politics

Highlights:

A former quarterback at the University of Connecticut, he achieved short-lived internet fame in 2011 when a video of him throwing trick passes went viral. Trump liked having him around and soon made him his personal assistant, taking him along whenever he traveled. As the campaign ramped up, he became Trump’s “body guy,” carrying the candidate’s bags and relaying messages.

he was also named director of the Presidential Personnel Office, which is responsible for the vetting, hiring, and firing of the four thousand political appointees who serve in the executive branch. McEntee may have never hired or fired anybody before in his life, but he was fiercely loyal—and for Trump, that made him the perfect choice for the job.

McEntee’s team reached the apex of its power after Trump lost the election in 2020. Within days, they orchestrated sweeping changes to the civilian leadership at the Pentagon that resulted in Defense Secretary Mark Esper and other top officials being fired. In preparing for Esper’s ouster, McEntee and his team created a memo listing the Pentagon chief’s sins against Trump, arguing he “consistently breaks from POTUS’ direction, and has failed to see through his policies.”

Trump fired Esper and replaced him with McEntee’s preferred successor, National Counterterrorism Center director and Army Special Forces veteran Christopher Miller. To serve as Miller’s senior advisor, McEntee recruited a retired Army colonel named Douglas Macgregor, whose regular appearances on Fox News had caught the White House’s attention. Chief among his qualifications was his penchant for praising Trump’s approach to US military involvement and calling for martial law along the US-Mexico border.

Three days after Macgregor arrived at the Pentagon, he called McEntee and told him he couldn’t accomplish any of the items on their handwritten to-do list without a signed order from the president. “Hey, they’re not going to do anything we want, or the president wants, without a directive,” Macgregor told him, emphasizing the need for an official White House order signed by Trump. The Pentagon’s stonewalling made sense, of course: You don’t make major changes to America’s global defense posture based on a glorified Post-it note from the president’s body guy. The order, Macgregor added, should focus on the top priority from McEntee’s list—Afghanistan—and it had to include a specific date for the complete withdrawal of all uniformed military personnel from the country. He suggested January 31, 2021.

McEntee and an assistant quickly typed up the directive, but they moved the Afghanistan withdrawal timeline up to January 15—just five days before Trump was set to leave office—and added a second mandate: a complete withdrawal of US troops from Somalia by December 31, 2020. McEntee, of course, didn’t know the first thing about drafting a presidential directive—let alone one instructing the movement of thousands of servicemen and -women. He had two jobs in the White House—only one of which he was qualified for—and neither one had anything to do with national security or the military. An order even 10 percent as consequential as the one McEntee was drafting would typically go through the National Security Council with input from the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the military commanders in the region. Instead, the guy who usually carried Trump’s bags was hammering it out on his computer, consulting with nobody but the retired colonel the president had just hired because he had seen him on cable TV.

Easy enough. The duo wrote up the order, had the president sign it, and sent it over to Kash Patel, the new acting defense secretary’s chief of staff. Chaos ensued. Upon receiving the order from his chief of staff, Christopher Miller called Joint Chiefs chairman Mark Milley to his office to discuss next steps. After reading the order, Milley told the January 6 Committee, he looked at Patel, who had just started working at the Pentagon three days earlier. “Who gave the president the military advice for this?” Milley asked him. “Did you do this?” “No,” Patel answered. “I had nothing to do with it.”

Milley turned to the acting defense secretary. “Did you give the President military advice on this?” he asked.

“No. Not me,” Miller answered. “Okay, well, we’ve got to go over and see the president,” Milley said, noting his job required him to provide military advice to the commander in chief. “I’ve got duties to do here, constitutional duties. I’ve got to make sure he’s properly advised.” And with that, Miller and Milley went to the White House to see Robert O’Brien, Trump’s national security advisor. “Robert, where’s this coming from?” Milley asked O’Brien. “Is this true?” “I’ve never seen it before,” O’Brien told him.

They were joined in the meeting by retired lieutenant general Keith Kellogg, the national security advisor to Vice President Pence. “Something is really wrong here,” Kellogg said, reading through the order. “This doesn’t look right.” “You’re telling me that thing is forged?” Milley responded in disbelief. “That’s a forged piece of paper directing a military operation by the president of the United States? That’s forged, Keith?” Despite McEntee’s best efforts—which included not only the advice from Macgregor but several minutes of searching the internet—the only part of the document that looked anything like an official presidential order was Trump’s signature at the bottom. But even that, Kellogg thought, could have been the work of an autopen used to mimic the president’s autograph on thousands of unofficial letters sent out by the White House.

They found him where he spent most of his time after the November election—in his private dining room next to the Oval Office, where the television on the wall was almost always on. Once the president confirmed he had indeed signed the document, O’Brien and Cipollone explained to him that such an order should go through some sort of process, and that an abrupt movement of so many US troops would be dangerous and unwise without proper planning. At the very least, they told him, such an order should be reviewed by White House lawyers.

“I said this would be very bad,” O’Brien recalled telling Trump. “Our position is that because it didn’t go through any proper process—the lawyers hadn’t cleared it, the staff [secretary] hadn’t cleared it, NSC [National Security Council] hadn’t cleared it—that it’s our position that the order is null and void.”