A group of five partisan former defense secretaries — including one who signed the discredited letter calling the Hunter Biden laptop Russian disinformation — are calling on Congress to hold hearings on President Donald Trump’s firing of top generals.
The former defense secretaries — William Perry, Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel, James Mattis, and Lloyd J. Austin III, who are all either Democrats or served in Democrat administrations — signed a letter saying they are “deeply alarmed” by the firings.
“We write to urge the U.S. Congress to hold Mr. Trump to account for these reckless actions and to exercise fully its Constitutional oversight responsibilities,” they said in the letter, which was predictably sent to legacy news media outlets.
A senior defense official told Breitbart News, “This is a typical move by the left. Whenever they have something that’s bad news for them, or something that they want to accelerate, they’ll get former officials to line up, and usually these letters are written by liberal think-tanks who then circulate them for signature.”
“It’s the swampiest of swampy [defense secretaries] signing this letter,” the official added.
Trump recently fired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown and, via Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, fired Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Slife, and the top judge advocate generals for the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
All of those military leaders served at the pleasure of the president and can be replaced at any time, per the president’s commander-in-chief authority under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution.
However, the former defense secretaries — who all were either forced to resign or fell under investigation — complained that Trump “offered no justification for his actions, even though he had nominated these officers for previous positions and the Senate had approved them.”
“As former Secretaries of Defense, we call on both the House and the Senate to hold immediate hearings to assess the national security implications of Mr. Trump’s dismissals,” they wrote, and demanded that the Trump administration “justify each firing.”
They also called on the Senate to refuse to confirm any new Department of Defense nominees, including Brown’s nominated replacement, Air Force Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Dan Caine.
The firings have infuriated Democrats in Congress. Notably, the letter’s signatories are either Democrats themselves or served in Democrat administrations.
Perry, who served in the Clinton administration, fell under congressional scrutiny in the aftermath of the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that led to the deaths of 19 airmen and 498 others injured. Senior Pentagon leaders were warned of a threat eight days before the attack, but it was not heeded.
Panetta, who served as CIA director and defense secretary in the Obama administration, was one of the signatories of the letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials who falsely claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. He has, to date, never retracted his endorsement of that letter, despite the FBI confirming that the laptop was indeed real and not Russian disinformation.
The senior defense official said that Panetta signing the letter is “a joke because he is one of the leaders of Hunter Biden cover up letter.” The official noted that Trump has pulled the security clearances of signatories of that letter, including Panetta.
While Hagel is a Republican, he also served in the Obama administration and was himself fired only after two years by former President Barack Obama over policy disagreements.
Mattis — while he served in the first Trump administration and has never confirmed his political affiliation, as defense secretary, he wanted to bring in Democrat Michele Flournoy as his deputy and surrounded himself with anti-Trump Democrats as his top advisers. He was also fired — or, forced to resign — by Trump over policy disagreements.
Austin served as former Democrat President Joe Biden’s defense secretary and fell under congressional scrutiny and investigation after it was discovered that he hid several hospitalizations from Biden and even his own deputy, leaving a break in the chain of command and risking the nation’s security. He was never held accountable for that, nor the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, which saw the deaths of 13 American service members.
Also notably, the former living defense secretaries who did not sign the letter were all Republicans — Mark Esper, Robert Gates, and William Cohen.
Despite the signatories’ own failures and transgressions, which in some cases led to the deaths of troops, they accused Trump of weakening “national security.”
They also claimed, “Talented Americans may be far less likely to choose a life of military service if they believe they will be held to a political standard.”
Recent figures by the Army and Navy actually show that military recruitment has only gone up during Trump’s election in November.
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