John Kelly, whose son died in combat, defends Trump’s call to widow

WASHINGTON — White House chief of staff John Kelly defended President Donald Trump’s phone call to the family of a U.S. soldier killed in Niger, and he said he was stunned that a Florida congresswoman had listened to the call and criticized the remarks.

“I thought at least that was sacred,” Kelly said of the president’s condolence call to Myeshia Johnson, widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, one of four U.S. troops killed in an Oct. 4 ambush.

A retired Marine general who lived through the painful casualty notification process after his son Robert was killed in combat in Afghanistan seven years ago, Kelly managed to humble the White House press corps during an emotional briefing Thursday.

Kelly began his remarks to the press corps with a nod to U.S. troops. “They are the best 1 percent this country produces. Most of you, as Americans, don’t know them. Many of you don’t know anyone who knows any one of them.”

At one point, Kelly asked if any reporters were Gold Star parents or siblings — the relatives of U.S. military members who died in battle. While the room included journalists whose relatives have served in Iraq or Afghanistan, no hands were raised. Kelly then took questions from reporters who raised hands when he asked if they knew a Gold Star family.

A day earlier, Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Fla., had ignited a controversy when she told the media that she was in a car with Johnson’s family and heard the conversation between Trump and the sergeant’s widow over a speaker. She said Trump had told Myeshia Johnson, a pregnant mother of two, that her slain husband “knew what he signed up for,” and “you know this is possible when you sign up but it still hurts.”

Cowanda Jones-Johnson, Sgt. Johnson’s aunt, told the Associated Press that she also heard the conversation, that Wilson’s account was accurate and Trump was “disrespectful.”

Recommended not calling

On Wednesday, Trump denied that he said the words Wilson attributed to him. But Kelly, who was in the room when Trump made the call, confirmed Wilson’s quotes, though he cast them as Trump expressing “his condolences in the best way he could.”

Kelly explained that he had told Trump that his casualty officer and best friend reminded him that his son Robert, then 29, was doing “exactly what he wanted to be do when he was killed.”

Kelly’s other son John serves in the Marines.

“My first recommendation was, ‘Do not do it,’” he said he told the president. No parent wants to receive such a phone call.

Kelly said he had been so upset after watching Wilson on television that he went to Arlington National Cemetery to “walk among the finest men and women of this earth.” For more than an hour, he walked among the headstones, “some of whom I put there because they were doing what I told them to do when they were killed.”

Kelly did not criticize the Johnson family, instead focusig his ire on Wilson. He recalled attending a 2015 dedication for an FBI building named after two agents slain in the line of duty in 1986. Then FBI Director James Comey gave a “brilliant memorial speech to those fallen men,” Kelly said.

‘Empty barrels’

After Comey’s speech, Kelly said, “a congresswoman stood up, and in the long tradition of empty barrels making the most noise, stood up there and 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, and we were stunned. Stunned that she had done it. Even for someone that is that empty a barrel, we were stunned.”

That congresswoman was Wilson.

In a statement placed on her House website before the briefing, Wilson wrote: “The loved ones Sgt. Johnson leaves behind are my constituents and my job now is to do all that I can to help them heal. I’ll save the bully pulpit for the necessary task of uncovering the circumstances surrounding the ambush and working to help ensure that our soldiers have all of the resources and support that they need while putting their lives on the line to keep others safe.”

Sgt. Johnson had participated in 5,000 Role Models for Excellence, a program Wilson founded. She has called the ambush that left Johnson and three others dead “Trump’s Benghazi,” a reference to a 2012 attack on a Libyan diplomatic mission that left four dead, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens, and that haunted Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign.

Veterans of Foreign Wars Communications Director Joe Davis described Kelly’s appearance as “direct, heartfelt, no mixed messages.”

For her part, Wilson told Politico, “John Kelly’s trying to keep his job. He will say anything. There were other people who heard what I heard.”

Contact Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com or 202-662-7391. Follow @DebraJSaunders on Twitter.