A top aide to Vice President Mike Pence said John Kelly was “terrible” and “duplicitous” as White House chief of staff and routinely kept President Trump in the dark to push his own goals.
Mark Paoletta, who served as chief counsel and assistant to Mr. Pence and later as general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget, challenged the honesty of Mr. Kelly, who was recently quoted as saying the former president met the definition of a fascist and said admiring things about Hitler.
“John Kelly was not a soldier’s soldier – at least not at the White House. His most-used skill as COS was threatening to resign,” Mr. Paoletta said on X. “John Kelly will say anything to stop President Trump from being re-elected. It won’t work.”
In two long posts on X, he described his first-hand experiences with Mr. Kelly trying to undermine Mr. Trump’s agenda.
“I worked in the White House with John Kelly, and I don’t believe a word he says. He was a terrible chief of staff who dishonestly kept information from the President to pursue his own agenda, an unelected former military official substituting his judgment for the duly elected President,” he said.
He cited two instances.
The first occurred in 2018 when Mr. Trump asked OMB Director Mick Mulvaney to find money in agency accounts to build the border wall, which led to OMB Deputy Russ Vought and Mr. Paoletta doing a deep dive on the project.
“With the help of superb career staff, we found a ton of money at the DOD that we could use to build the wall. But Kelly prevented Mulvaney from presenting this plan to President Trump,” Mr. Paoletta said. “Several months later, in a meeting, Trump said, ‘Mick, I asked you to find me money and you haven’t.’ Mulvaney responded, ‘I found the money, but I have not been able to brief you.’”
According to Mr. Paoletta, Mr. Kelly would not set up policy time for Mr. Mulvaney to discuss the plan with Mr. Trump. After this exchange, Mr. Mulvaney presented his plan to Mr. Trump, and he authorized the strategy.
“John Kelly was insubordinate and duplicitous by refusing to provide the president with lawful options to implement the President’s policies,” Mr. Paoletta said.
The other incident involved the establishment of the Election Integrity Commission.
Mr. Paoletta said he wanted the president to shut it down and direct the Justice Department to investigate election fraud.
“At the time, I was the counsel to VP Pence, who was the co-chair of the commission, and I had developed a list of previous presidential directives to DOJ to investigate a specific matter,” he said. “So that when making this recommendation, I could show it was well supported by history and tradition.”
According to Mr. Paoletta, during a meeting with Mr. Kelly and others, he made his recommendation and shared the list of examples of presidents directing the DOJ to engage in specific matters.
“Kelly said he would never show this list to the president because it would be terrible if President Trump knew he could do this, his life was tough enough in dealing with the president, and he did not want him to know this.”
He said, “To my knowledge, President Trump was never made aware of these examples. John Kelly thought he knew better than President Trump and was opposed to many of his policies.”
“As Chief of Staff, Kelly dishonestly tried to thwart President Trump’s policies, and on the wall funding, he was totally fine with not doing everything possible to stop illegal aliens flooding into our country and murdering innocent Americans, all in order to protect the bloated bureaucracy of his DOD.”
Mr. Mulvaney was named Mr. Kelly’s replacement on Dec. 14, 2021, and Mr. Kelly was expected to stick around through the rest of the year to help with the transition, but Mr. Paoletta said Mr. Kelly was AWOL during that time.
“He maybe came in once more to do any meaningful work. We were getting ready for a shutdown, which happened on Dec 22nd, and Kelly was AWOL to help out during the run-up to it. Just checked out,” Mr. Paoletta said.
“John Kelly’s nightmare scenario isn’t a ‘fascist’ White House — it’s a White House without John Kelly in it. Why else would he think threatening to quit all the time would have any impact on the president?”
The Washington Times reached out to Mr. Kelly for comment.
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.
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