John Kelly is not keeping quiet on his way out of the Trump administration, and he’s tossing the president under the bus a teensy tiny bit.
He’s defending his tenure by saying that he kept Trump from doing a lot of what he wanted to do:
In the phone interview Friday, Kelly defended his rocky tenure, arguing that it is best measured by what the president did not do when Kelly was at his side.
It was only after Kelly’s departure was confirmed Dec. 8, for example, that Trump abruptly announced the pullout of all U.S. troops from Syria and half the 14,000 troops from Afghanistan, two moves that Kelly had opposed.
Kelly’s supporters say he stepped in to block or divert the president on dozens of matters large and small. They credit him, in part, for persuading Trump not to pull U.S. forces out of South Korea, or withdraw from NATO, as he had threatened.
Trump sometimes pressed his advisors on the limits of his authority under the law, often asking Kelly, “‘Why can’t we do it this way?’”
But Trump never ordered him to do anything illegal, Kelly stressed, “because we wouldn’t have.”
“If he had said to me, ‘Do it, or you’re fired,’” Kelly said he would have resigned.
So you wonder what will happen now that Kelly’s gone.
And he admits that Trump will not have a physical wall from sea-to-sea, which he promised and ridiculed other Republicans about:
“To be honest, it’s not a wall,” Kelly said.
When Kelly led Homeland Security in early 2017, one of his first steps was to seek advice from those who “actually secure the border,” Customs and Border Protection agents who Kelly calls “salt-of-the-earth, Joe-Six-Pack folks.”
“They said, ‘Well we need a physical barrier in certain places, we need technology across the board, and we need more people,’” he said.
“The president still says ‘wall’ — oftentimes frankly he’ll say ‘barrier’ or ‘fencing,’ now he’s tended toward steel slats. But we left a solid concrete wall early on in the administration, when we asked people what they needed and where they needed it.”
This might actually help Trump, right? It lessens the brunt of it once Trump unveils whatever it is he’s going to be able to get built. And his answer on illegal immigration is not really Trump’s policy:
On Saturday, Trump blamed Democrats for the deaths of the two migrant children this month. He also threatened to cut off U.S. aid to Central America if another reported migrant caravan isn’t stopped.
Kelly didn’t respond to Trump’s threats directly but suggested part of the problem lies on the U.S. side of the border.
“If you want to stop illegal immigration, stop U.S. demand for drugs, and expand economic opportunity” in Central America, he said.
And he puts the blame of family separations on Jeff Sessions, while defending Nielsen:
“What happened was Jeff Sessions, he was the one that instituted the zero-tolerance process on the border that resulted in both people being detained and the family separation,” Kelly said. “He surprised us.”
The chaotic implementation then fell primarily on the Department of Health and Human Services and Nielsen, who came under fire for standing on the White House podium and saying there was no policy of separating families.
“She is a good soldier; she took the face shot,” a senior White House official said on background. “No one asked her to do it, but by the time we could put together a better strategy, she’d already owned it.”