Senior Administration Officials Lied To Trump About Troop Levels So He Wouldn’t Pull Out Of Syria

[mystery-ak]

Senior Administration Officials Lied To Trump About Troop Levels So He Wouldn’t Pull Out Of Syria


Christian Datoc
Senior White House Correspondent
November 13, 2020 9:55 AM ET


Jim Jeffrey, the United States’ retiring Special Representative to Syria and the special envoy in the fight against the Islamic State, confirmed Thursday that he and other senior administration officials routinely misled President Donald Trump on troop levels in the Middle East.

Jeffrey, speaking to Defense One, explained how despite Trump’s stated promise to withdraw America from endless Middle Eastern engagements, he was able to convince the president to commit to keeping between 200 to 400 troops in the region in 2019 to “secure” oil fields held by U.S. allies and other strategic positions.

“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” he stated. “When the situation in northeast Syria had been fairly stable after we defeated ISIS, [Trump] was inclined to pull out. In each case, we then decided to come up with five better arguments for why we needed to stay. And we succeeded both times. That’s the story.”

Jim Sciutto, CNN’s chief national security correspondent, tweeted that senior Defense Department officials told him similar stories when interviewed for his book, “The Madman Theory.”

“If you look at his tweets, they were definitive about leaving,” Sciutto wrote Friday, quoting a passage from the book. “And then we didn’t leave. And now we haven’t left, we’re still there, and that’s a good thing.”

more
https://dailycaller.com/2020/11/13/senior-administration-officials-lied-to-trump-about-troop-levels-so-he-wouldnt-pull-out-of-syria/

[skeeter]

I'm no Constitutional expert but it seems to me this is a very grave offense.

The people of this nation cannot continue to ignore what is going on in their government.