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Nikki Haley, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, has revealed that Rex Tillerson and another senior adviser were working to destroy the president’s agenda and attempted to recruit her in their secret plan to undermine him.
Haley said former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and former White House chief of staff John Kelly both tried to get her to work around the president.
“Kelly and Tillerson confided in me that when they resisted the president, they weren’t being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country,” Haley wrote in a memoir, according to The Washington Post.
“It was their decisions, not the president’s, that were in the best interests of America, they said. The president didn’t know what he was doing,” she continued.
In one instance, she recalled a disagreement she had with Tillerson and Kelly during an Oval Office meeting over a suggestion that the United States should not fund a United Nations agency that supports the Palestinians. Haley said that she had the support of the Trump administration’s Middle East envoys.
But she said that Kelly and Tillerson said that cutting aid could lead to threats to Israel as well as reduced U.S. influence though they did not provide evidence or other expert opinion in making the assumption.
Tillerson had previously worked closely with Israel’s enemies in the Middle East when he headed a large oil company.
“I was so shocked I didn’t say anything going home because I just couldn’t get my arms around the fact that here you have two key people in an administration undermining the president,” Haley added to the Post.
“It absolutely happened,” Haley also told CBS News on Sunday. “And instead of saying that to me, they should’ve been saying that to the president, not asking me to join them on their sidebar plan.”
“It should’ve been, ‘Go tell the president what your differences are, and quit if you don’t like what he’s doing.’ But to undermine a president is really a very dangerous thing. And it goes against the Constitution, and it goes against what the American people want. And it was offensive.”
Kelly told the paper that if giving Trump “the best and most open, legal and ethical staffing advice from across the [government] so he could make an informed decision is ‘working against Trump,’ then guilty as charged.”
Tillerson, who left his position as Secretary of State, hasn’t yet responded to Haley’s claims.
In her upcoming memoir, “With All Due Respect,” Haley said that she had an obligation to carry out Trump’s orders because he was elected by the American public, the Post reported.
The memoir is slated to be published on Tuesday, Nov. 12.
–Metro Voice and wire services
