According to a breaking new report from Axios, yet another Trump-era official is expected to flip on the ex-president.
Just a handful of months before the now-infamous January 6th Capitol riot, then-President Donald Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper and replaced him with Chris Miller. Since Trump’s election loss, Miller has dropped some pretty clear hints that he was no fan of the Trump administration nor the president himself. And now, according to the Axios report, it seems the expectation is that Miller will soon flip on Trump and throw him under the bus during the upcoming Capitol riot hearing, as he testifies about the multiple failings surrounding the attack.
Back in March, the Associated Press reported that one of the biggest problems on the day of the deadly riot was the fact that multiple demands for the deployment of the National Guard to get a handle on the ever-growing situation were ignored due to the fear of “optics.”
Speaking to VICE Showtime back in March, Miller explicitly blamed the attacks on former President Donald Trump.
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“Would anybody have marched on the Capitol, and tried to overrun the Capitol, without the president’s speech? I think it’s pretty much definitive that wouldn’t have happened,” Miller stated at the time.
The former Pentagon chief went on to note that he wasn’t sure if Trump had a full grasp on what he was doing, what his supporters would do, or the full scope of the consequences of the situation. But nevertheless, he feels (and we agree with him) that the riot simply never would have happened if it weren’t for Donald Trump.
“It seems cause-and-effect,” Miller noted, speaking of Trump’s crowd-rowdying speech. “The question is, did he know he was enraging people to do that? I don’t know.”
In a January 15th statement, Miller denied any involvement by the Pentagon in the painfully slow response to the Capitol attack. In fact, he claimed that, by military standards, guards were actually deployed rather quickly. The problem with this narrative, though, is the fact that guard members weren’t sitting in their homes all across the county with miles and hours between themselves and the riot. They were already deployed close to the White House. They quite literally could have walked from their positions to the Capitol where the attack was happening.
All of this information is expected to be pretty much repeated by Miller when he delivers testimony on “unanswered questions” during Wednesday’s leg of the Capitol riot hearing — all of which would effectively throw his old boss under the bus.
You can read the full report here.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
