On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “All In,” Representative Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), who is an Iraq War veteran of the Marine Corps, stated White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly is not acting in an honorable or adult manner and is “willingly being used by the Trump administration.”
Gallego said, “Look, we have a fact. He lied. We have video proof that he lied. And now this chief of staff, he’s not a general is using his former title, basically, to cow public opinion against everybody and against this member of Congress, a respectable member of Congress, a member of the branch of government that also is very involved in the decisionmaking process. And he absolutely lied. And the fact that he uses both his title, which is the general, former general in the United States Marine Corps, and the good things that come from that, but then doesn’t actually live by the values, is just disgusting.”
Gallego continued that if he had lied about someone else during the course of duty and didn’t own up to it after being caught, “I would have been busted down a rank. So, he doesn’t get to live in both worlds. If you want to use your title to somehow gain some type of leverage, on — especially on the media, then you should live by those values. But he’s not. So he’s no longer a general. We should not treat him like a general. He’s a chief of staff, and we should recognize that he’s being used by the Trump administration and he willingly is being used by the Trump administration.”
Gallego added, “At this point, the way he’s acting, he’s not honorable. You lied about another fellow human being. You were caught in that lie, and then you have not actually owned up to your actions. Not only are you not honorable, you’re not an adult.”
He also criticized Kelly for only taking questions from journalists who knew Gold Star families, which Gallego said is “an overreach. That is a level of militarism that this country should not be moving in. Just because you are a general does not mean — or a former general, somehow you get to declare that one citizen has a better opinion than the other, especially when it comes to issues of war. We’re a citizen-led, and will be forever — as long as I can be here on this earth, military. And certainly, generals and former generals do not get to somehow impede on the fourth estate about where they get to ask questions about what happened, who died, and why they died. It’s absolutely ridiculous that he even did that. That was actually the breaking point for me.”
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