Co-host of “The View” Sunny Hostin on Wednesday apologized for describing actions taken by Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the final days of former President Trump’s time in the White House as “treasonous,” a week earlier.
“I was pretty harsh in my judgment of him because I even thought it was treasonous,” Hostin said. “My understanding was that he back channeled with China, that he spoke directly to China without approval, but that wasn’t so.”
Hostin said she “should know better” and made her comments “upon limited information.”
“I owe him an apology because he didn’t act rouge,” she continued. “And that’s very important for me to acknowledge. He maintained the military command.”
Last week, Hostin had suggested Milley had broken the chain of command and defied his oath based on reporting in a new book about the final days of Trump’s presidency.
“I think that you break command in that way. You are committing treason. You’re going outside of the chain of command,” Hostin said. “I worked for the government for many years and it is sacrosanct to go within the chain of command.”
According to the book, authored by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, the general “was certain that Trump had gone into a serious mental decline in the aftermath of the election, with Trump now all but manic, screaming at officials and constructing his own alternate reality about endless election conspiracies.”
Milley also reportedly gathered senior leadership at the Pentagon and told them not to take orders from anyone unless he was involved following the attack by Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
“No matter what you are told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I’m part of that procedure,” Milley reportedly said.
Hostin’s comments come as Milley spent Tuesday and Wednesday testifying before Senate and House panels on the calls and the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
During testimony on Wednesday, Milley told lawmakers he would never tip off an enemy to any “surprise” U.S. attack.
“I’m not going to tip off the enemy about what the United States is going to do in an actual plan. What I’m trying to do is persuade an adversary that is heavily armed that was clearly and unambiguously according to intelligence reports very nervous about our behavior and what was happening inside this country and they were concerned that we President Trump was going to launch an attack. He was not going to launch an attack,” Milley said. “At the direction of the secretary of defense, I engaged the Chinese in order to persuade them to do that. I would never tip off any enemy to any kind of surprise thing that we were going to do. That is a different context than that conversation.”