Defense Secretary Mark Esper ‘terminated’ by Trump

Speculation about Esper’s firing had briefly waned in the days after the election.

White House insiders reportedly advised Trump against sacking the perceived disloyal cabinet member who had stayed largely out of sight and out of the country in the months leading up to the Tuesday election with trips that took him across North Africa and Asia.

Esper has scarcely given public comments since June.

Those comments likely sealed his fate.

“I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act,” Esper said at a Pentagon press briefing in direct contradiction of Trump’s stated intent to use the military to quell public protests following the death of George Floyd.

“I’ve always believed and continue to believe that the National Guard is best suited for performing domestic support to civil authorities in these situations,” he said at the time.

NBC reported last week that Esper was prepared to turn in his letter of resignation.

The Pentagon refused after the election to address speculation that Esper would resign or confirm to the Washington Examiner that Esper remained in his position.

Esper would be gone just days later, lasting short of 16 months.

Esper did not plan to quit, ready to resign over Vindman

In a Military Times interview conducted Wednesday, Esper said he had no intention of quitting, but he was expecting to be fired for months.

“My soldiers don’t get to quit,” he told the Military Times. “So if I’m going to quit, it better be over something really, really big.”

Retaliation against Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman for his testimony against Trump in the impeachment inquiry would have “absolutely” been worth resigning over, Esper said.

The Ukraine expert at the National Security Council had listened in to Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that later became the centerpiece of the impeachment trial.

Vindman ultimately resigned just before a promotion review widely seen to be a test of whether the White House would punish the officer by reversing his promotion.

“At the end of the day, it’s as I said — you’ve got to pick your fights,” Esper said. “I could have a fight over anything, and I could make it a big fight, and I could live with that — why? Who’s going to come in behind me? It’s going to be a real ‘yes man.’ And then God help us.”

The tell-all interview conducted just after the election but before his official firing Monday tells a different story than Esper’s nuanced resignation letter, obtained by Fox News on Monday.

In it, Esper notes that he served as army secretary and secretary of defense “in full faith to my sworn oath to support and defend the Constitution … while keeping the Department out of politics and abiding by the values Americans hold dear.”

The resignation letter is also a laundry list of achievements, from steering the domestic COVID-19 response to realigning the depart to face great power competition as prescribed in the 2018 National Defense Strategy.

Surprise firing

CNN reported that White House chief of staff Mark Meadows called Esper to inform him of the termination five minutes before the president tweeted the news.

“I don’t see what Trump benefits from firing him,” Brookings Institution security expert Michael O’Hanlon told the Washington Examiner shortly before the Trump firing.

“[He] isn’t going to go out there and challenge Trump, but also isn’t going to invoke the Insurrection Act to go put down protesters in Black Lives Matter square either or support that,” said O’Hanlon.

An Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran, Miller was sworn in as head of the NCTC Aug. 10, moving over from the Pentagon, where he served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and combating terrorism.

He was a White House adviser on counterterrorism and transnational threats in 2018-2019.

“Chris will do a GREAT job!” Trump wrote in his tweet. “Mark Esper has been terminated. I would like to thank him for his service.”