Outgoing White House chief of staff John Kelly gave an extensive interview to the Los Angeles Times in which he reflected on his tumultuous tenure under President Donald Trump. During the two-hour conversation, Kelly, who is officially stepping down Wednesday, said that the White House long ago gave up on the idea of a border wall. “To be honest, it’s not a wall,” Kelly said. And that isn’t a new development. “The president still says ‘wall’—oftentimes frankly he’ll say ‘barrier’ or ‘fencing,’ now he’s tended toward steel slats. But we left a solid concrete wall early on in the administration, when we asked people what they needed and where they needed it.”
Kelly also suggested that he may not see the wall as the priority that his boss does. During his brief tenure as head of Homeland Security in early 2017, he went to get advice from those who “actually secure the border.” And what he heard from the agents, who Kelly characterized as “salt-of-the-earth, Joe-Six-Pack folks,” is that the wall wasn’t the solution to everything. “They said, ‘Well we need a physical barrier in certain places, we need technology across the board, and we need more people,’” he said.
In another portion of the interview, Kelly blamed then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions for the policy to separate families at the border, which caught the White House by surprise. “What happened was Jeff Sessions, he was the one that instituted the zero-tolerance process on the border that resulted in both people being detained and the family separation,” Kelly said. “He surprised us.” It was then up to Kirstjen Nielsen, the Homeland Security secretary who at first denied the existence of such a policy, to take it on and make it work. “She is a good soldier; she took the face shot,” a senior White House official said. “No one asked her to do it, but by the time we could put together a better strategy, she’d already owned it.”
As he gets ready to leave the White House, Kelly said that this tenure should be measured not by what the president did but rather what he did not do. Kelly denies he was ever asked to do anything illegal, but says he always made sure Trump had access to numerous points of view before making a decision. “It’s never been: The president just wants to make a decision based on no knowledge and ignorance,” Kelly said. “You may not like his decision, but at least he was fully informed on the impact.”
Tweet Share Share Comment
