Former President Barack Obama did not call White House chief of staff John Kelly after his son, a Marine, was killed while serving in Afghanistan in 2010, the White House said just hours after President Trump encouraged reporters on Tuesday to ask whether Kelly had received a call from Obama.
“I think I’ve called every family of someone who’s died,” Trump told Fox News Radio’s Brian Kilmeade during one of several interviews he gave to conservative hosts on Tuesday. “As far as other representatives, I don’t know. You could ask Gen. Kelly, did he get a call from Obama?”
A White House official told the Washington Examiner that Kelly did not receive a call from Obama after his son died in action.
The focus on how much outreach Obama offered to the families of fallen soldiers arose Monday when Trump claimed inaccurately that his predecessors “didn’t make calls” after military service members died. During the same press conference, Trump expressed uncertainty about the frequency of Obama’s calls to families who have lost loved ones in the military, but guessed the Democratic president had not made many such phone calls.
“I don’t know if he did,” Trump said of whether Obama called the families during a wide-ranging press conference on Monday. “I was told that he didn’t often, and a lot of presidents don’t. They write letters. I do, I do a combination of both.”
Trump faced questions about his efforts to contact military families in the context of an attack on U.S. servicemembers in Niger earlier this month that claimed the lives of four U.S. Army Green Berets.
Kelly did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
