Sometime between January 4 and January 12, a senior national security official tells journalist Adam Ciralsky that no one knows who is in charge at the Defense Department.
While waiting to begin my reporting in earnest, I sought a gut check from a senior national security official. “If I was writing your headline,” he advised me, “it would be, ‘Who really is the secretary of defense? Chris Miller? Kash Patel? Ezra Cohen? Or [Chairman] Mark Milley?’ I don’t know how to answer that, frankly. The scuttlebutt is that Miller is the good guy who’s the frontman and it’s Cohen and Patel who are calling all the shots.”
Vanity Fair
Christopher Miller became the Acting Secretary of Defense on November 9 when Mark Esper was fired. The next day, Kashyap Patel was promoted to serve as Miller’s chief of staff, and Ezra Cohen-Watnick was named acting undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security. Both Patel and Cohen are considered Trump loyalists with a history of ignoring protocols and ethics to carry out the president’s demands.
General Mark Milley has been in his position as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for over a year.
Another source for the same story tells Ciralsky that Patel and Cohen were “chained” to Miller “by the White House to make sure that he doesn’t do too much completely honest, forthright stuff.”
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