Top US General Mark Milley appeared before Congress this week to defend Pentagon decision making in Afghanistan but instead found himself fighting a personal battle with lawmakers who charged that he has been more preoccupied with rehabilitating and burnishing his own image, CNN reported. Republican lawmakers directed their fury at Milley for his cooperation with a number of reporters whose recent books about the Trump administration painted a damning portrait of the former President's final months in office, and for the revelation that Milley reassured his Chinese counterpart after intelligence revealed Beijing was worried former President Donald Trump might launch an attack. As Republicans seized on the reports to accuse Milley of violating the chain of command and denigrating the former President, hearings that were meant to examine military and policy missteps in Afghanistan instead devolved at times into a battle between Milley and lawmakers about whether he had become a political actor -- a suggestion the four-star general emphatically pushed back on. "I'm concerned that there's mischaracterizations of me becoming very politicized as an individual and that it's my willingness to become politicized, which is not true," Milley told the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday. "I am trying to stay apolitical, and I believe I am." The subject is fraught for Milley, who was in danger of having his standing undermined by a now-notorious June 2020 photo op when he stood beside Trump at Lafayette Square after troops violently cleared protestors from the small park in front of the White House. Milley apologized in the wake of that event, acknowledging that his participation, particularly while in uniform, violated the sacrosanct military ethos of avoiding political activity. "I have done my best to remain personally apolitical, and to try to keep the military out of actual domestic politics, and I made a point of that from the time I became the Chairman and especially beginning last summer," Milley said, in an apparent reference to the Lafayette Square event. As with the Senate Armed Services hearing on Tuesday, some Republican lawmakers used their limited speaking time Wednesday to castigate Milley for spending time over the year since the damaging photo op engaging with writers whose books about the Trump administration paint the general as a champion of democracy and American institutions. One lawmaker directly accused the four-star general of being more preoccupied with his image than winning wars, while others criticized him for disclosing consequential information to members of the media rather than Congress.
