The committee revealed testimony that Trump knew he had lost because he issued the order to be done before January 6th
This actually wasn’t new. Jonathan Swan published an account of this in his after-action reporting for Axios in the spring of 2021:
John McEntee, one of Donald Trump’s most-favored aides, handed retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor a piece of paper with a few notes scribbled on it. He explained: “This is what the president wants you to do.”
1. Get us out of Afghanistan.
2. Get us out of Iraq and Syria.
3. Complete the withdrawal from Germany.
4. Get us out of Africa.
It was Nov. 9, 2020 — days after Trump lost his re-election bid, 10 weeks before the end of his presidency and just moments after Macgregor was offered a post as senior adviser to acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller.
As head of the powerful Presidential Personnel Office, McEntee had Trump’s ear. Even so, Macgregor was astonished. He told McEntee he doubted they could do all of these things before Jan. 20.
“Then do as much as you can,” McEntee replied.
In Macgregor’s opinion, Miller probably couldn’t act on his own authority to execute a total withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Afghanistan because he was serving in an acting capacity. If this was for real, Macgregor told McEntee, then it was going to need an order from the president.
The one-page memo was delivered by courier to Christopher Miller’s office two days later, on the afternoon of Nov. 11. The order arrived seemingly out of nowhere, and its instructions, signed by Trump, were stunning: All U.S. military forces were to be withdrawn from Somalia by Dec. 31, 2020. All U.S. forces were to be withdrawn from Afghanistan by Jan. 15, 2021.
What the fuck is this? Miller wondered.
A former Green Beret, Miller had directed the National Counterterrorism Center and was accustomed to following process. Trump had tapped him to run the Pentagon after his unceremonious firing-by-tweet of Mark Esper. It was Miller’s third day on the job.
News of the memo spread quickly throughout the Pentagon. Top military brass, including Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, were appalled. This was not the way to conduct policy — with no consultation, no input, no process for gaming out consequences or offering alternatives.
A call was quickly placed to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone. In turn, Cipollone notified the national security adviser, Robert O’Brien. Neither Cipollone nor O’Brien had any idea what the order was or where it had come from.
Neither did the office of the staff secretary — whose job it was to vet all the paper that reached the president’s desk. Yet the paper bore Trump’s distinctive Sharpie signature.
The U.S. government’s top national security leaders soon realized they were dealing with an off-the-books operation by the commander in chief himself.
Many would rally to push back — sometimes openly and in coordination, at other times so discreetly that top Trump administration officials had to turn to classified intercepts from the National Security Agency for clues.
Trump’s instincts should have come as little surprise. He was frantically trying to salvage his own legacy while simultaneously trying to overturn the election results and block Biden’s transition to power. The result was chaos.
[…]
On the afternoon of Nov. 9, 2020, Douglas Macgregor, a decorated but highly controversial combat veteran, walked into the Presidential Personnel Office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a historic and flamboyant building in the Second Empire style that once housed the U.S. Department of War.
It was six days after the election and two days since the networks had called the race for Biden.
Some staff had gone home early, while others had left to look for new jobs. Those who were still there were mostly Trump acolytes, remaining in a holding pattern as the president and his allies continued their ill-fated quest to overturn the results of the election.
Macgregor, 68, whose views on foreign policy and social issues had seen him excommunicated from the military establishment, had come to meet McEntee, who had become a controversial figure for his role in purging government officials deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump.
At 31, McEntee was a former college football quarterback who had worked as Trump’s body man. He arrived about 10 minutes after Macgregor, having come straight from the West Wing. He ushered Macgregor into his office and closed the door behind them.
It was a spacious, light-filled room adorned with Trump campaign memorabilia. McEntee swung a chair around his desk to sit directly in front of Macgregor. “Colonel, the president wants to know if you’ll come in and be senior adviser to the acting secretary of defense,” McEntee said.
“Why is that?” Macgregor asked.
“The president thinks that you can help extricate us from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and potentially other places,” McEntee replied.
Macgregor, a fluent German speaker, was at that point Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to Berlin. It was a position he would never hold because of the election loss, not to mention his long history of incendiary remarks, which included advocating martial law at the U.S.-Mexico border and criticizing Germany for giving welfare benefits to “millions of unwanted Muslim invaders.”
He had met Trump for the first time at an hour-long Oval Office meeting in April 2020. The two men bonded instantly. When the meeting ended, Trump told Macgregor, “I want you working for me. We will find a way.”
Trump had warmed to Macgregor through his frequent appearances on Fox News, where the colonel blasted the U.S. military’s presence overseas, called congressional leaders “idiots,” and ridiculed Pentagon policies on diversity and transgender troops.
Appointing Macgregor to a senior Pentagon position would be like rolling a grenade into the building — particularly as Milley and Macgregor held each other in contempt.
“Only met him once, but he was arguably the least impressive in a series of underwhelming Army Chiefs of Staff since 1991,” Macgregor told Axios about Milley. A source close to Milley said that Milley considered Macgregor “irrational edging on all-out lunacy.”
It didn’t take long for Macgregor to agree to McEntee’s offer to come onboard. It was then that McEntee handed Macgregor the paper with Trump’s electrifying instructions.
The article goes on to discuss Trump’s erratic decision making about the wars being pulled an pushed by the military leadership, going back and forth between his isolationism and hardcore authoritarian impulses, clearly out of his depth. It’s rather chilling…
After the election they knew he had lost and decided to work overtime to accomplish their goals before he left:
As the reality set in that Biden’s election victory would not be overturned, McEntee accelerated his push to install people supportive of Trump’s agenda at the top of the Pentagon.
They included Macgregor as Miller’s senior adviser, former Devin Nunes aide Kash Patel as chief of staff, and Anthony Tata as acting under secretary of defense for policy. Former senior NSC intelligence official Ezra Cohen, who was chief of special operations under Esper, was promoted to acting under secretary of defense for intelligence and security.
For all the feverish media speculation about the president’s secret agenda at the Pentagon, the ultimate goal was simple: Steamroll the generals and extract America from its foreign engagements, leaving behind a done deal that could not be easily reversed by the next administration.
As the new senior adviser to the new acting defense secretary, Douglas Macgregor was prepared for anything amid the fetid psychodramas of those post-election weeks.
He arrived to chaos at the Pentagon. His own decision to seek a presidential order for an immediate Afghanistan withdrawal had set off a bizarre round of bureaucratic make-it-up-as-you-go.
Late on Nov. 10, one of McEntee’s subordinates drafting the memo for the president called Macgregor to say they didn’t know how to do it: “We’re trying to put this together but we don’t have a model for this and we want to get the language straight.”
Macgregor responded: “Go in and get a presidential decision memorandum out of the file cabinet, and that’s what you model it on, and it will have all the authorities you need and the people specifically to whom the order has to go.”
“Let’s stick first with Afghanistan,” he continued. “I think it should be midnight, 31 December 2020.” In Macgregor’s opinion this allowed Trump to fulfill a promise made when he ran for election: to get out of Afghanistan.
Macgregor heard nothing more from the White House and was astonished when he discovered two days later that the memo had not only been immediately signed by Trump on Nov. 11, but it had also been redrafted somewhere along the way.
The date for the Afghanistan withdrawal had been switched — either by accident or design — from Dec. 31 to Jan. 15.
Likewise a date included in the order for disengagement from Somalia — a smaller piece of Trump’s demand to “get out of Africa” — had been changed from Jan. 15 to Dec. 31. Both dates were designed to get U.S. troops out of both countries before Trump left office on Jan. 20.
The memo did not contain instructions for Iraq and Syria — or Germany — aspirations that Macgregor concluded were unachievable in time.
The memo Macgregor asked for had been drafted by a staffer from PPO, brought to the president, signed, and then delivered to Miller within 48 hours. On it hung the future of Afghanistan.
So why didn’t it happen?
Christopher Miller summoned Macgregor to his office and told him he had been fielding furious phone calls from officials who had gotten wind of the order, including an incandescent Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Miller instantly suspected Macgregor had a hand in this back-channel scheme. He respected it as a slick bureaucratic play — and considered himself a full-throated supporter of getting out of Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan — but also believed the order was dead on arrival.
He saw the timeline as logistically impossible and thought it risked leaving the incoming Biden administration with a dangerous situation. Relations between Miller and Macgregor would be cool for the brief remainder of Trump’s term.
Over at the White House, it didn’t take long for McEntee to be fingered as the main culprit of the scheme. McEntee played dumb and suggested he was just doing what Macgregor had instructed him to do.
Cipollone, the White House counsel, and O’Brien, the national security adviser whose reaction one source described as “torqued,” marched in to see Trump — and put an immediate halt to the plan. They convinced him to wait to hold a full meeting with his national security team, which took place in the Oval Office within 48 hours.
There, O’Brien, Miller, and Milley all aligned against the plan. They painted a vivid picture of Kabul falling to the Taliban if U.S. forces withdrew precipitously in the final days of the Trump presidency.
In previous conversations with Trump, they had raised the specter of Saigon in 1975, where images of American helicopters evacuating people from rooftops as the North Vietnamese took control of the capital city would become engraved in the historical record of the Vietnam War. The unsubtle warning: This would be Trump’s legacy if he rushed to the exit.
And, in a recent interview with Axios, Trump pointed out he also had concerns about leaving behind billions of dollars of equipment during a rushed, logistically complex withdrawal. “You remember those scenes [in Vietnam] with the helicopters, right, with people grabbing onto the gear? You don’t want that. And I wouldn’t have that,” he said. Still, Trump had signed the extraordinary ‘withdrawal in eight weeks’ order.
In the Oval Office meeting, O’Brien reminded Trump that they’d already agreed on a more modest plan to reduce the number of troops in Afghanistan to 2,500 by the beginning of 2021.
(When O’Brien had announced this in a speech back in October, Milley had set off a mild media controversy by suggesting that the national security adviser was merely “speculating.” Senior Pentagon officials had been privately arguing it was unwise and unsafe to go below 4,500 troops. O’Brien shot back to Milley that when he spoke in public, he spoke for the president.)
Had Milley not resisted the initial 2,500 plan, Trump might not have felt the need to sign the back-channel order. In the view of Trump’s mistrusting inner circle, this was typical of Pentagon leadership: Delay key decisions by disputing that strategic meetings had led to consensus, insist the process was still ongoing, and leak apocalyptic scenarios to the media.
These were the tactics Trump allies believed military leaders had perfected to obstruct presidents over the course of decades.
Now — in the face of the Macgregor alternative — the drawdown plan Milley had once scorned was looking like a godsend to the generals. In addition to the 2,500 U.S. troops, there would be thousands of additional U.S. contractors, NATO troops and NATO contractors all remaining in Afghanistan, which was seen as a sufficient force to maintain counterterrorism capabilities.
O’Brien told the president that drawing down to 2,500 troops in Afghanistan was the closest Trump could come to fulfilling his campaign promise while protecting U.S. interests and maintaining leverage in peace negotiations with the Taliban. And he was putting the U.S. on the path to ending the forever war.
And with that, Trump folded on total withdrawal for the last time as president.
Of course. And it allowed him to lie profusely about his previous plans, suggest that he would never have left the bases they had in the country (which meant leaving troops in the country, of course) and condemn Joe Biden for following the original Trump timeline for withdrawal.
This should be better known because of all the grief Biden took for his withdrawal. I’m glad the committee highlighted it.
