Former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said Donald Trump’s weekend comments about Gen. Mark Milley were inappropriate on multiple fronts.
“I don’t think that Mr. Bone Spurs is in any position to criticize any member of our military, let alone a war hero like Gen. Milley,” Katyal said on MSNBC’s “Inside With Jen Psaki” on Sunday. The former president and 2024 hopeful avoided the draft during the Vietnam War with a medical exemption over “bone spurs” in his foot.
Trump attacked the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a Truth Social post over the weekend, calling him a “woke train wreck” and suggesting that he had committed treason, “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”
Katyal said Trump’s comments were “ridiculous” given that Milley is “almost certainly a witness” in the federal election subversion case against the ex-president. Milley could also play a role in Trump’s classified documents case and a Colorado lawsuit seeking to bar him from 2024 ballots for engaging in insurrection, Katyal said.
The judge overseeing the Colorado suit on Friday issued a protective order prohibiting threats and intimidation in the case.
Meanwhile, the judge in the Jan. 6 case, Tanya Chutkan, is mulling prosecutors’ recent request for a gag order to protect witnesses, prosecutors, the judge and the jury pool amid ongoing inflammatory social media activity from Trump.
Katyal said Trump was “already on really thin ice beforehand,” noting Chutkan had warned him about his online behavior.
“He was warned ... stay within the lines,” Katyal said. “And Trump, of course, has been pushing those lines dramatically over the last six weeks. And you know, this tweet, I think, is further evidence of that.”
Trump’s legal team has a Monday deadline to file its opposing brief to the proposed order.
Watch Katyal’s analysis below on MSNBC.
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