Maybe if former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly had apologized to Democratic Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson for wrongly calling her a liar years ago, she might be among those lauding him for telling the truth about his former boss.
“General Kelly’s too-little, too-late critique of Trump should fool no one,” Wilson told the Daily Beast in a statement on Wednesday. “He’s far from a savior.”
The cowboy hat-sporting congresswoman from Miami went on: “He always knew Trump’s disdain for the military, yet remained a cowardly chief of staff, supporting Trump as he admired dictators and their atrocities, like Trump saying Hitler ‘did some good things.’”
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However brave the four-star general was during his 43 years as a Marine, Wilson believes that Kelly’s 16 months in the Trump White House marked him as a coward.
“Kelly was nothing more than a spineless enabler during the most disgraceful presidency in our nation’s history,” she said.
But of course, her reaction was also personal; as Wilson put it in 2017, “totally personal.”
“He lied on me over and over again, and all I did was name the new FBI building in my district in record time while we were in recess,” she continued on Wednesday. “He wasn’t even present at the ribbon cutting, but he insulted me and never apologized.”
She was speaking of the dedication of the Benjamin P. Grogan and Jerry L. Dove Federal Building in Miami in 2015. Grogan and Dove were two FBI agents who were shot to death while apprehending a bank robber in 1986. Wilson was at the ceremony there and addressed the crowd in a shiny red cowboy hat.
While he was still in the White House in 2017, Kelly had given the press a secondhand account of the ceremony and her remarks that went like this: “A congresswoman stood up and, in a long tradition of empty barrels making the most noise, stood up there in all of that and talked about how she was instrumental in getting the funding for that building and how she took care of her constituents because she got the money. And she just called up President Obama, and on that phone call, he gave the money, the $20 million, to build the building, and she sat down.”
On hearing Kelly’s account, Wilson pointedly responded, “I was not even in Congress in 2009 when the money for the building was secured.”
She concluded, “So that’s a lie. How dare he?”
Then, a video of Wilson’s remarks at the 2015 dedication surfaced. It showed she had taken credit only for expediting the naming of the building. And she had turned the spotlight from herself, asking every first responder attending the ceremony to stand up and be honored.
Fox TV host Laura Ingraham asked Kelly, “Do you feel like you have something to apologize for?” Kelly replied, “No. Never.”
He added. “I’ll apologize if I need to. But for something like that, absolutely not. I stand by my comments.”
The real source of Kelly’s anger appears to have stemmed not from a building named after two fallen FBI agents. It involved a fallen soldier, Army Sgt. La David Johnson, who had been killed in Niger on Oct. 4, 2017.
The soldier was from Wilson’s district and she rode in a limousine with his pregnant widow, Myeshia Johnson, to the airport to greet her husband’s remains.
A master servant escorting them got a call. It was President Trump and Myeshia asked the sergeant to put the phone on speaker so everybody in the car could hear what Trump then said:
“He knew what he signed up for but it hurts anyways.”
Myeshia later told Good Morning America, “It made me cry because I was very angry about the tone of his voice and how he said it. He couldn’t remember my husband’s name. The only way he remembered my husband’s name was because he told me he had my husband’s report in front of him, and that’s when he actually said La David.”
She added, “I heard him stumbling on trying to remember my husband’s name, and that’s what hurt me the most, because if my husband is out here fighting for our country and he risked his life for our country, why can’t you remember his name?”
She continued, “That’s what made me upset and cry even more, because my husband was an awesome soldier.”
Rep. Wilson told a CBS news station about the call.
“David was a young man from our community who gave his life for our country,” she told CBS Miami. “He’s a hero. I was in the car when President Trump called. He never said the word hero. He said to the wife, ‘Well, I guess he knew what he was getting into.’ How insensitive can you be?”
Trump called Wilson a liar, insisting he had been ‘very respectful’ and it had been “a very nice conversation.” The widow and her family made it known that they considered Wilson’s account entirely accurate and appropriate.
The next day, Kelly weighed in with the White House press. He spoke of when his son, Marine Lt. Robert Kelly, was killed in Afghanistan in 2010. Fellow Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford—then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—sought to comfort him by saying, “He was doing exactly what he wanted to do when he was killed. He knew what he was getting into.”
And that was what Kelly had in turn advised Trump to say to the widow who had just lost her husband.
“[Trump] expressed his condolences in the best way he could,” Kelly now said.
Kelly also made it known that he was outraged that Wilson had made public what he felt should have been a deeply private conversation.
“If she was listening in on the conversation between President Trump and the soldier’s wife, she had a plan,” Kelly said. “Why would she be listening in on this private conversation? She is a politician of the worst kind, lower than the normal politician.”
Kelly said he had been so upset by Wilson’s remarks that he strode from the White House and visited Arlington Cemetery.
“To go walk among the finest men and women on this earth,” Kelly said. Those buried there include his son.
Five years later, Wilson is still waiting for Kelly to apologize. And, in one of the countless fissures in our current public life, she sees him as ultimately an empty barrel.
“I’m glad he’s finally speaking out against Trump, and his warnings about Trump should alarm every American,” Wilson told the Daily Beast. “However, this seems more like a desperate attempt to salvage his reputation now that Trump’s insanity is undeniable rather than proof of any real integrity from General Kelly.”
