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President Donald Trump insisted Thursday he had nothing to do with keeping the USS John S. McCain hidden from the site of his weekend speech in Japan. He said whoever had done so was “well-meaning.”
“I wasn’t involved. I would not have done that. I was very angry with John McCain because he killed health care,” Trump said, referring to the late senator’s deciding vote that killed a Senate GOP bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
“I was not a big fan of John McCain in any way, shape or form,” Trump continued in comments to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House. “Now, somebody did it because they thought I didn’t like him, OK? And they were well-meaning. I will say, I didn’t know anything about it. I would never have done that.”
Trump’s second denial came after The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the White House wanted the Navy to move the destroyer “out of sight,” citing an email between military officials. The ship is named for the late Arizona senator and his father and grandfather, who were admirals. Trump initially denied any knowledge of the effort in a tweet Wednesday night.
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The Navy’s top officer, Adm. John Richardson, said in an interview with The Washington Post that he was still gathering facts about what happened and promised to cooperate with Shanahan’s investigation.
“It goes without saying” that service members are expected to remain apolitical, Richardson said.
“Part of this trust and confidence that we have not only up and down the chain of command but also just as importantly with the American people is that we do support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” he said in his office at the Pentagon. “We are apolitical by nature, and so that needs to be maintained.”
If there was direction from the White House on the issue, “it would not be a surprise” if the Navy personnel involved sought to carry it out, Richardson said.
“We are obviously going to take that direction very, very seriously,” he added. “But I really need to understand the sequence of events.”
If the secretary of defense or the secretary of the Navy did not know about the directive, then they are failing to protect their uniformed personnel from an “imperial” White House staff, Collins added.
“This is a very bad precedent,” Collins said, referring to Shanahan’s acknowledgment that he did not know about the order.
Kori N. Schake, deputy director general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and co-editor with Mattis of a book about civil-military relations, said that the incident should raise concern but that it is too early to say where responsibility rests or how serious it is.
Apart from possible chain-of-command issues, Schake said that liaison officers in the White House may have been trying to make a difficult president’s visit go smoothly and Pentagon officials may have been trying to comply — “ending up compromising the professionalism of everyone involved.”
The McCain saga continues
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