Former President Donald Trump’s former acting Defense Secretary, Chris Miller, recently told the Daily Mail that the Jan. 6 Committee threatened to “make his life hell” if he continued to claim that Trump authorized the National Guard to secure the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The Secretary of Defense admitted Trump ordered 10,000 National Guard troops for Jan 6 pic.twitter.com/UsWUNm06Yk
— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) February 12, 2021
Miller told the U.K. news outlet that when he went on television interviews to recall his experience with Trump calling for authorities to deploy the National Guard to the Capitol on Jan. 6, the panel would drag him in for hours to ask for additional testimony.
Miller was only on the job for about two months as acting Defense Secretary after Donald Trump fired his predecessor over disagreements about how to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan. Events suddenly thrust him into the situation with the election and Jan. 6 protests. According to Miller, it seemed clear that former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) was running the show.
He went on to describe how an appearance on Fox News with former Trump official Kash Patel led to yet another call from the Jan. 6 Committee.
“The two of us were on [Fox News] and the next day my lawyer got a call from the Jan. 6 staff director — I forgot exactly who it was — but basically saying, very legalistic: ‘Well, if your client has additional information he wants to share, we’d be happy to have him re-interviewed,’” Miller told the Daily Mail. “It was the latent threat of the government continuing to intrude in my life.”
It was not overt or blatant, but to Miller, it seemed clear that the Jan. 6 Committee was trying to keep him from telling the press that Trump tried to call in the National Guard.
“It was more that latent threat of: ‘If you want to keep going on TV, we’re gonna drag you in here again for additional hours of hearing testimony.’ So that was the nature of that whole thing,” he told the outlet.
Miller says the committee intimidated him from speaking out again until recently. “I wasn’t communicating with anybody, because I knew any interactions I had on it would result in me having to… acknowledge that I’d been in communications with other people. And then that just sort of opens up a whole can of worms with the investigators that I just didn’t want to do.”
