“You’re Telling Me That Thing Is Forged?”: The Inside Story of How Trump’s “Body Guy” Tried and Failed to Order a Massive Military Withdrawal

The absurdity of the situation was captured in McEntee’s interview with the January 6 Committee:

Q: Is it typical for the Presidential Personnel Office to draft orders concerning troop withdrawal?

McEntee: Probably not typical, no.

Because they were so out of their depth, McEntee and his assistant ended up reaching out to Macgregor again—they didn’t know how to arrange the document they were working on. “I was called on the phone by one of McEntee’s staffers who was having trouble formatting the order and getting the language straight,” Macgregor recalled. The retired colonel told the thirty-year-old staffer to open a cabinet, find an old presidential decision memorandum, and copy it.

Easy enough. The duo wrote up the order, had the president sign it, and sent it over to Kash Patel, the new acting defense secretary’s chief of staff.

Chaos ensued.

Upon receiving the order from his chief of staff, Christopher Miller called Joint Chiefs chairman Mark Milley to his office to discuss next steps. After reading the order, Milley told the January 6 Committee, he looked at Patel, who had just started working at the Pentagon three days earlier.

“Who gave the president the military advice for this?” Milley asked him. “Did you do this?”

“No,” Patel answered. “I had nothing to do with it.”

Milley turned to the acting defense secretary. “Did you give the President military advice on this?” he asked.

“No. Not me,” Miller answered.

“Okay, well, we’ve got to go over and see the president,” Milley said, noting his job required him to provide military advice to the commander in chief. “I’ve got duties to do here, constitutional duties. I’ve got to make sure he’s properly advised.”

And with that, Miller and Milley went to the White House to see Robert O’Brien, Trump’s national security advisor.

“Robert, where’s this coming from?” Milley asked O’Brien. “Is this true?”

“I’ve never seen it before,” O’Brien told him.

They were joined in the meeting by retired lieutenant general Keith Kellogg, the national security advisor to Vice President Pence. “Something is really wrong here,” Kellogg said, reading through the order. “This doesn’t look right.”

“You’re telling me that thing is forged?” Milley responded in disbelief. “That’s a forged piece of paper directing a military operation by the president of the United States? That’s forged, Keith?”