Republican Sen. Marco Rubio is calling for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley to be fired after he reportedly “contemplated a treasonous leak of classified information to the Chinese Communist Party.”
In a letter to President Joe Biden, Rubio referenced reports that Milley “worked to actively undermine the sitting Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces” by making secret calls to Communist China’s Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army to reassure him that the U.S. was not organizing a strike.
“These actions by General Milley demonstrate a clear lack of sound judgement, and I urge you to dismiss him immediately,” Rubio wrote. “I do not need to tell of you the dangers posed by senior military officers leaking classified information on U.S. military operations, but I will underscore that such subversion undermines the President’s ability to negotiate and leverage one of this nation’s instruments of national power in his interactions with foreign nations.”
Not only did Milley disregard national security, Rubio said, “even more egregiously, reports indicate that General Milley interfered with the procedures by which the civilian commander-in-chief can order a nuclear strike.”
“He purportedly instructed officials not to take orders without his involvement and forced them to take an oath to that effect. A senior military officer interfering with that civilian-controlled process is simply unacceptable at best, and at worst, would cause ambiguity which could lead to war,” Rubio warned.
Rubio also chastised Milley for trying to “rationalize his reckless behavior” by claiming the “military’s judgement was more stable than its civilian commander.”
“It is a dangerous precedent that could be asserted at any point in the future by General Milley or others. It threatens to tear apart our nation’s longstanding principle of civilian control of the military,” Rubio wrote before reiterating that Biden “must immediately dismiss General Milley. America’s national security and ability to lead in the world are at stake.”
