General John Kelly attacked after emotional speech on fallen soldiers, he’s ‘odious’ and liar using a ‘racist term’
During an emotional 18 minutes on Thursday, White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly cut through the debate over condolence calls to Gold Star families, appealing to the political class to allow at least this one thing to remain “sacred.”
Democratic lawmakers, operatives and allies in the media immediately turned on Kelly, himself a Gold Star father.
“Kelly isnt just an enabler of Trump. He’s a believer in him. That makes him as odious as the rest. Dont be distracted by the uniform,” Hillary Clinton’s former spokesman and CNN contributor Brian Fallon tweeted.
The Florida lawmaker who criticized President Trump’s condolence call to a fallen soldier’s wife, called Kelly a racist.
“I feel sorry for General Kelly. He has my sympathy for the loss of his son,” the lawmaker, Rep. Frederica Wilson, a Democrat, told CNN. “But he can’t just go on TV and lie on me.” She took issue with his “empty barrel” remark: “That’s a racist term ― thinking about that, we looked it up in the dictionary because I had never heard of an empty barrel and I don’t like to be dragged into something like that,” Wilson said.
“I am stunned by John Kelley’s lies about a black woman who he called an ’empty barrel,’” MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell tweeted.
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