White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham responded sharply to former White House chief of staff John Kelly after he criticized President Trump.
“I worked with John Kelly, and he was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great President,” Grisham said Saturday evening.
.@PressSec responds to Kelly:
“I worked with John Kelly, and he was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great President.”
— Annie Karni (@anniekarni) October 26, 2019
The president also said in a statement, “John Kelly never said that, he never said anything like that. If he would have said that I would have thrown him out of the office. He just wants to come back into the action like everybody else does.”
And Kelly’s comments earn a statement attributed to Trump:
“John Kelly never said that, he never said anything like that. If he would have said that I would have thrown him out of the office. He just wants to come back into the action like everybody else does.”
— Annie Karni (@anniekarni) October 26, 2019
The retired, four-star Marine general said Saturday that “I feel bad that I left” the White House and blamed the president’s pending impeachment on the fact that acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney is “a yes man,” in contrast to his more combative approach.
“That was almost 11 months ago, and I have an awful lot of, to say the least, second thoughts about leaving,” Kelly continued, speaking at the Sea Island Summit in Georgia, which is hosted by the Washington Examiner. “It pains me to see what’s going on because I believe if I was still there or someone like me was there, he would not be kind of, all over the place.”
Kelly on Saturday also described Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria as a “catastrophically bad idea” and “the wrong thing to do [because] it has opened the way for the Russians to be very, very influential in the Middle East.”
