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House of Commons Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Friday she had spoken to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley about available precautions that would prevent “an unstable president” – Donald Trump – from “ordering a nuclear strike “or even access nuclear launch codes and start other armed forces. hostilities.
“The situation of this imbalanced president could not be more dangerous, and we must do all we can to protect the American people from their imbalanced assault on our country and our democracy,” Pelosi, D-Calif., Said in a letter. to fellow Democratic lawmakers.
A spokesperson for the Office of Chiefs of Staff said Pelosi had made an appeal with Milley and “he had answered his questions regarding the nuclear command authority process.”
The Pentagon and the National Security Council did not respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-California, speaks during her weekly press conference in Washington on Thursday, January 7, 2021.
Caroline Brehman | CQ-Roll Appeal, Inc. | Getty Images
Pelosi’s letter comes two days after Trump supporters riot outside and inside the U.S. Capitol following a rally where the president urged them to “fight” with him to prevent Joe Biden to become the next President of the United States. Five people, including a Capitol police officer, died in the riot.
The section of the letter referring to his conversation with Milley is titled “Preventing an Unbalanced President from Using Nuclear Codes.”
“This morning I spoke to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley to discuss the precautions available to prevent an unstable president from launching military hostilities or accessing launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike “Pelosi wrote.
Air Force General John Hyten, who is currently vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said three years ago in a speech that he would resist the execution of an order from Trump to launch nuclear weapons if he deemed such an order “illegal”.
Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, DN.Y., and other Democratic lawmakers have called for Trump to be removed from office, either by invoking the 25th Constitutional Amendment or by indictment.
In his letter, Pelosi told lawmakers that: “Almost fifty years ago, after years of empowering their rogue president, Republicans in Congress finally said [Richard] Nixon that it was time to go. “
“Today, in the wake of the president’s dangerous and seditious acts, Republicans in Congress must follow suit and call on Trump to step down – immediately. If the president does not leave office imminently and voluntarily, Congress will continue our action. “
James Schlesinger, who was Nixon’s Secretary of Defense, said during the final days of the Watergate crisis he ordered military commanders to contact him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger if Nixon was leading a nuclear launch.
At the time, Nixon was drinking heavily as he lost public and congressional support.
During a meeting, according to “The Last Days,” a book about the end of his presidency, Nixon told a group of members of Congress: “I can go into my office and pick up a phone and in 25 minutes des million people will be dead. “
This led Senator Alan Cranston, D-Calif., To warn Schlesinger of “the need to prevent a stunned president from plunging us into a holocaust.”
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