GOP candidate slams 'Benedict Milley': Report amounts to 'coup against a sitting president'
Teddy Daniels said Milley is a product of the Beltway 'cesspool'
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The Republican candidate for U.S. Congress in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains compared Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley to Revolutionary War traitor Benedict Arnold and called on the House and Senate to "grow a backbone" and investigate the Massachusetts native.
Teddy Daniels, a wounded veteran of the war in Afghanistan, told "Tucker Carlson Tonight" the allegations in Robert Costa and Robert Woodward's book "Peril" amount to treason if true.
He blamed the Beltway establishment for creating an environment in which people like Milley are in positions of power and subsequently protected, adding that the general should be held to account by Congress.
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"It is a cesspool down there. You know it, and I know it," he said. "They say Washington, D.C., is insanity surrounded by the rest of the United States," said Daniels, who is running against Democratic Rep. Matt Cartwright in what is President Joe Biden's childhood congressional district.
"So, Benedict Milley needs to go: he should have been gone a long time ago, and I am still waiting for somebody down there to step up and do something about the situation," he said, referring to Major Gen. Benedict Arnold – who had plotted with British officer Major Andre to surrender the Colonials' fort in Orange County, New York.
During his interview, Daniels went on to say that Milley is a military officer who acts like he wants to instead be a Democratic Party politician.
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"He did a coup against a sitting, duly-elected, president of the United States," he claimed.
Host Tucker Carlson added that Milley has already disgraced himself by making racially charged remarks about "White rage" before a congressional hearing he alleged demeaned a large swath of the American civilian population.
"It ha[s] already been conclusively established that Mark Milley was pushing open racism on the United States military – that he had bragged to fellow officers about resisting the American president ‘with guns’ and that he had told military officials that he, not the president, controlled our country's nuclear arsenal," Carlson said.
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Biden said Tuesday he stands by Milley in his current capacity, while Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon's chief spokesman, said he "can’t speak to processes before this administration took office" – after a reporter prompted him regarding Donald Trump's claim Milley may have committed "treason".
"What I’m telling you is, typically, that when the chairman or the secretary, they interact with counterparts. It’s a function of the job," Kirby told the reporter.