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James S. Brady Press Briefing Room 9:04 A.M. EST SECRETARY WILKIE: Hello, everybody. Thank you all for coming. This is our week of weeks at the Department of Veterans Affairs. This is the week that we honor the 41 million Americans who have put on the uniform since the first shots were fired at Lexington Green in April of 1775. Last night, the President held a ceremony with the National commanders of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, and Rolling Thunder to permanently honor those POWs and MIAs who have been lost to the history books since our...

Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie did not disclose his associations with Confederate groups on a questionnaire submitted to the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee prior to his confirmation hearing last year, according to a copy of the form obtained by CNN's KFile. CNN's KFile reported in December that Wilkie, who was confirmed by the Senate as VA secretary in July 2018, gave a speech to a chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in 2009 and, in 1995, praised Confederate President Jefferson Davis in a speech at the US Capitol. Wilkie was also at one point a member of the Sons...

Robert Wilkie, President Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs, is a conservative Washington insider who would bring three decades of military policymaking and a deep list of Capitol Hill connections to a Cabinet post responsible for serving one of the administration’s most crucial constituencies. But when he appears Wednesday for his Senate confirmation hearing, Wilkie also will draw on a career spent working shoulder to shoulder with polarizing figures in U.S. politics and often defending their most divisive views. Wilkie, 55, has impeccable credentials: three decades at the center of the country’s most important military policies. The...

I am pleased to announce that I intend to nominate highly respected Admiral Ronny L. Jackson, MD, as the new Secretary of Veterans Affairs........In the interim, Hon. Robert Wilkie of DOD will serve as Acting Secretary. I am thankful for Dr. David Shulkin’s service to our country and to our GREAT VETERANS!

WASHINGTON — Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain said Tuesday he is refusing to advance U.S. President Donald Trump’s nominees to the Pentagon until he is satisfied the administration is communicating its plans for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Outside a tense committee hearing on Afghanistan with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford, McCain told Defense News that because the administration has not been open with Congress, “we’ve been holding nominations … from the Pentagon to fill in those Pentagon jobs.” The disclosure came little more than a month after Trump...