In the hours before Donald Trump’s last flight aboard Air Force One—and Joe Biden’s inauguration on the steps of the reclaimed and restored Capitol—many Americans and TV anchors wondered what the hell the 45th president and his inner circle had been doing, or undoing, in his waning days. Until Biden took the oath of office, the country had held its collective breath. Trump, in those final weeks in office, hadn’t simply dented the guardrails of governance. He’d demolished them. In order to watch things up close, I sought and secured a front-row seat to what was happening inside the Department of Defense, the only institution with the reach and the tools—2.1 million troops and weapons of every shape and size—to counter any moves to forestall or reverse the democratic process. I came away both relieved and deeply concerned by what I witnessed.
On the evening of January 5—the night before a white supremacist mob stormed Capitol Hill in a siege that would leave five dead—the acting secretary of defense, Christopher Miller, was at the White House with his chief of staff, Kash Patel. They were meeting with President Trump on “an Iran issue,” Miller told me. But then the conversation switched gears. The president, Miller recalled, asked how many troops the Pentagon planned to turn out the following day. “We’re like, ‘We’re going to provide any National Guard support that the District requests,’” Miller responded. “And [Trump] goes, ‘You’re going to need 10,000 people.’ No, I’m not talking bullshit. He said that. And we’re like, ‘Maybe. But you know, someone’s going to have to ask for it.’” At that point Miller remembered the president telling him, “‘You do what you need to do. You do what you need to do.’ He said, ‘You’re going to need 10,000.’ That’s what he said. Swear to God.”
I could not recall the last time a contingent that large had been called up to supplement law enforcement at all, much less at a demonstration—the Women’s March and the Million Man March sprang to mind—and so I asked the acting SECDEF why Trump threw out such a big number. “The president’s sometimes hyperbolic, as you’ve noticed. There were gonna be a million people in the street, I think was his expectation.” Miller maintained that initial reports on the anticipated crowd size were all over the map—anywhere from 5,000 to 40,000. “Park Police—everybody’s so hesitant to give numbers. So I think that was what was driving the president.”
On the morning of January 6, as Miller recounted, he was hopeful that the day would prove uneventful. But decades in special operations and intelligence had honed his senses. “It was the first day I brought an overnight bag to work. My wife was like, ‘What are you doing there?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know when I’m going to be home.’” To hear Patel tell it, they were on autopilot for most of the day: “We had talked to [the president] in person the day before, on the phone the day before, and two days before that. We were given clear instructions. We had all our authorizations. We didn’t need to talk to the president. I was talking to [Trump’s chief of staff, Mark] Meadows, nonstop that day.”
The security posture and response on January 6 did not occur in a vacuum. June 1, 2020, had been a perilous precedent. On that day federal police had expelled peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square to facilitate the president’s saunter over to St. John’s Church for a publicity stunt. But the brute force displayed to clear out the area proved a national embarrassment and allegedly influenced Washington mayor Muriel Bowser’s view, come January, about how the capital should be policed—and by whom. On the day before all hell broke loose on the Hill, she made it clear the D.C. police (MPD) would be running the show on the 6th, though 340 unarmed National Guard troops had been requested to help with traffic: “The District of Columbia is not requesting other federal law enforcement personnel and discourages any additional deployment without immediate notification to, and consultation with, MPD.”
Miller told me that when Trump made him head of the Pentagon, in November, “the bar was pretty low.” He had three goals. “No military coup, no major war, and no troops in the street,” before observing dryly, “The ‘no troops in the street’ thing changed dramatically about 14:30…. So that one’s off [the list].”
The day began with a lull. “We had meetings upon meetings. We were monitoring it. And we’re just like, Please, God, please, God. Then the damn TV pops up and everybody converges on my office: [Joint Chiefs of Staff] chairman [Mark Milley], Secretary of the Army [Ryan] McCarthy, the crew just converges.” And as intelligence started cycling in, things went from watch and see to “a current op.” Miller recalled, “We had already decided we’re going to need to activate the National Guard, and that’s where the fog and friction comes in.”
“The D.C. mayor finally said, ‘Okay, I need more,’” Kash Patel would tell me. “Then the Capitol police—a federal agency and the Secret Service made the request. We can support them under Title 10, Title 32 authorities for [the] National Guard. So [they] collectively started making requests, and we did it. And then we just went to work.”
What did Miller think of the criticism that the Pentagon had dragged its feet in sending in the cavalry? He bristled. “Oh, that is complete horseshit. I gotta tell you, I cannot wait to go to the Hill and have those conversations with senators and representatives.” While Miller confessed that he hadn’t yet emotionally processed the day’s events, he said, “I know when something doesn’t smell right, and I know when we’re covering our asses. Been there. I know for an absolute fact that historians are going to look…at the actions that we did on that day and go, ‘Those people had their game together.’”
Miller and Patel both insisted, in separate conversations, that they neither tried nor needed to contact the president on January 6; they had already gotten approval to deploy forces. However, another senior defense official remembered things quite differently, “They couldn’t get through. They tried to call him”—meaning the president.The implication: Either Trump was shell-shocked, effectively abdicating his role as commander in chief, or he was deliberately stiff-arming some of his top officials because he was, in effect, siding with the insurrectionists and their cause of denying Biden’s victory.
As for Mike Pence, Miller disputed reports that the vice president was calling the shots or was the one who sent in the Guard. The SECDEF stated that he did speak with Pence—then in a secure location on the Hill—and provided a situation report. Referring to the Electoral College certification that had been paused when the mob stormed the building, Miller recalled Pence telling him, “We got to get this thing going again,” to which the defense secretary replied, “Roger. We’re moving.” Patel, for his part, said that those assembled in Miller’s office also spoke with congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Mitch McConnell. “We were called upon to do our job, and we executed because we had the reps and sets built into our process to get the troops where they were requested, to put up a fence, to secure a perimeter, and to help clear the Capitol compound. I mean, that’s just what we do.” Others, of course, believe reinforcements came far too late that day, possibly serving to embolden extremists for years to come.
Ezra Cohen, another of Miller’s top confidants, believes that his colleagues’ words and deeds may be well and good, but are beside the point: “The president threw us under the bus. And when I say ‘us,’ I don’t mean only us political appointees or only us Republicans. He threw America under the bus. He caused a lot of damage to the fabric of this country. Did he go and storm the Capitol himself? No. But he, I believe, had an opportunity to tamp things down and he chose not to. And that’s really the fatal flaw. I mean, he’s in charge. And when you’re in charge, you’re responsible for what goes wrong.”
Continuous, real-time access to a Trump cabinet member—especially during that tumultuous period—was rare. But on January 4, two days before the bloody assault on the U.S. Capitol, I made an overture to Pentagon officials. Could I spend the remaining days of the Trump administration embedded with Miller? I also requested face time with his two closest aides, who were known throughout Washington as staunch Trump loyalists, highly critical of the so-called deep state: Kashyap “Kash” Patel, Miller’s 40-year-old chief of staff, who’d been an aide to Congressman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), another Trump acolyte, and Ezra Cohen, 34, the under secretary of defense for intelligence (USDI), who came aboard on National Security Adviser Mike Flynn’s watch and was later fired by NSC chief H.R. McMaster.
Miller agreed, and I raced to Washington for COVID testing so I could join his entourage. Like many others, I had been worried that Donald Trump, using domestic havoc or a foreign military skirmish as pretext, might move to delay Biden’s inauguration—or actually attempt a putsch by invoking martial law. Having worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and later as an attorney for the CIA (before I began my career in journalism), I understood the national security wiring diagram. And I recognized that in the absence of the vice president invoking the 25th Amendment, Secretary Miller was the one person standing between an unhinged president and a full-scale national meltdown.
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.”
What happened on January 6 made the assignment feel even more pressing. With the president missing in action, who was protecting the republic? Was Miller—with his command of America’s troops and nukes—still receiving orders from the vestigial president? And what to make of Cohen and Patel, who in some corners of the Pentagon were referred to as zampolit, a term the Soviets used to describe political enforcers who were deployed to strategic locations to ensure loyalty to the Kremlin?
As the dust from the insurrection was still settling and as talk of impeachment gained momentum, I tagged along with Miller and his team as they went about their last days in office (Tuesday, January 12, to Tuesday, January 19). In addition, it was agreed that virtually everything would be on the record and on tape: Miller, Cohen, and Patel wore lapel microphones during our conversations.
“When we came in here, they literally expected Ezra and Kash to have blood dripping from their mouths because they just, like, ripped the throat out of a baby,” Miller told me as we sat in the living room of his well-appointed Virginia home. “Then all of a sudden, they’re like, ‘Jeez, they’re actually willing to take on the machine.’”
Chris Miller—55, with a shock of white hair—neither acts nor speaks like a prototypical cabinet member. First off, he had commanded an airborne Special Forces battalion and fought in some of the earliest combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. (Three current officials I consulted, who asked for anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject matter, confirmed that Miller had also served with Task Force Orange, a military intelligence unit so secret that its name is rarely uttered.)
Miller was a little-known careerist who had labored in relative obscurity for decades. That is, until November 9, 2020, when President Trump tweeted: “I am pleased to announce that Christopher C. Miller, the highly respected Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (unanimously confirmed by the Senate), will be Acting Secretary of Defense, effective immediately.” Trump added, “Mark Esper has been terminated. I would like to thank him for his service.” (Secretary Esper’s dismissal had been brewing since the summer, when he issued a mealy-mouthed apology for participating in a June 1 stroll with the president across Lafayette Square. Upon his departure, three top aides left with him.)
When I pressed Miller about the perception that he must be a loyalist or a yes-man—given the timing of his appointment, just two days after the election had been called for Biden—Miller’s answer was anything but party line. “I’ll just be straight up. My family’s not huge fans of the Trump administration.” He added, “It’s really bothered my daughters and my wife. My son, he’ll be like, ‘Holy cow, they called you a stuffed-shirt moron today.’” He then directed his ire at the cottage industry of retired military officers who questioned his fitness in the press, including some of those who had trained him, earned his loyalty, and shaped his character: “You fucking assholes. If I fail, you failed.” One highly placed source worried less about Miller himself and more about his having “to navigate around” Cohen and Patel—“these Svengalis chained to him by the White House to make sure that he doesn’t do too much completely honest, forthright stuff.”
Cohen was promoted to a more senior role and Patel brought into the Pentagon in the wake of Miller’s appointment, adding to the view that they were Trump watchmen implanted to keep a keen eye on things. Both had drawn scads of media attention—Patel, in particular, for trying to help discredit Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and for his appearance in the Ukraine controversy that led to Trump’s first impeachment. People across the national security spectrum said: You don’t have to like, respect, or agree with Cohen and Patel, but you underestimate their drive and Machiavellian prowess at your own peril.
Just as Trump had filled his cabinet with people who had long antagonized the departments they would oversee (think of his secretaries of energy, interior, and education, for example), this trio, according to some observers, was made up of anti-deep-staters who, once Trump had decapitated the Pentagon leadership, were going to come in and try to cut the fat, show the Chinese and Iranians who’s boss, pull American troops out of war zones, and allow the president to deploy forces when and where he damn well pleased—even if they only had a couple of months to do it. And yet, as the president stewed over how to overturn his loss to Joe Biden, it’s a safe assumption that he was not all that focused on his new defense secretary and his lieutenants.
Ezra Cohen, sometimes referred to as ECW (for Ezra Cohen-Watnick), was a highflier. He’d worked in human intelligence, and he rose through the ranks of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). He’d been caught in the crossfire after reports surfaced that he’d provided classified documents to Congressman Devin Nunes to help the then chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence make the case that American intelligence agencies had spied on Trump and his associates—an assertion Cohen vigorously denied. His boss, H.R. McMaster, canned him. But ever the survivor, Cohen returned to the fold last April. Seven months later he was named USDI, overseeing his former employer (DIA), along with the alphabet soup that comprises America’s largest intelligence-gathering enterprise: NSA, NGIA, NRO, and DCSA.
His promotion was fodder for trolls of every stripe. “To the left I became this horrible person that enabled the president, attacking [Obama officials] and all this other stuff like that,” Cohen contended as we sat in his kitchen and later drove through a Chick-fil-A before tooling around northern Virginia. “And then to the crazy people on the right—that are dangerous people that did the horrible, antidemocratic behavior with the Capitol—these nutjobs are saying that I am QAnon.”
Kash Patel’s road to the Pentagon was less linear than Cohen’s. The son of Indian immigrants, he got a law degree from Pace and became a public defender. After helping prosecute terror suspects at home and abroad for the Obama Justice Department, he was assigned to aid units such as Delta Force and SEAL Team Six as they hunted down what he referred to as “the global rack and stack of bad guys, determined the order, established find/fix/finish options, and then executed.” Accustomed to the rough-and-tumble, he soon was working for Nunes as senior counsel on the House Intelligence Committee—just as Nunes, siding with the president, was trying to throw sand in the gears of Mueller’s Russia probe. Patel soon joined the NSC and was leading White House counterterrorism efforts—a gig he’d landed after Fox News host Sean Hannity took him to meet Trump in the Oval.
“Kash had a meteoric rise,” a senior administration official explained. “He gets hired for the Russia collusion [investigation], and that put him at the president’s doorstep. For the past year Kash has swung the biggest dick in D.C. because he could just say, ‘Oh, I’m going to go to the president.’ And we were on emails with him where he’s telling four-star generals, ‘Hey, this is a White House priority. Don’t make me go talk to the president, because I will.’ And the generals always rolled over.”
Patel and I grabbed drinks at an outdoor bar in Blagden Alley in Washington’s Shaw neighborhood. The day before, a Washington Post photographer had captured Michael Lindell, the MyPillow CEO and one of Trump’s fringiest allies, walking into the West Wing carrying a piece of paper that included the instruction: “Move Kash Patel to CIA Acting.” Sipping an IPA and wearing a baseball cap—bearing the insignia of a British special forces unit—Patel seemed utterly unfazed. He said he’d never met or communicated with the MyPillow guy.
I asked Patel about an Axios story that broke just before we sat down to talk. It asserted that CIA director Gina Haspel threatened to resign after learning that Trump planned to install Patel as her deputy. “I’m not going to comment on what the president wanted to do or didn’t want to do, but there’s no conversations of that now or this week or this year,” he replied. But he seemed to be playing coy. The CIA gambit took place last year. In fact, when I had spoken with Cohen about the matter, he had told me, “The idea was to put Kash in as the deputy, which doesn’t require Senate approval, and then to fire Gina the next day, leaving Kash in charge…. Robert O’Brien, [Trump’s national security adviser], is the one who deep-sixed it.” When I pressed Patel further about these machinations, which had occurred in December, I saw him turn lawyerly: “That stuff is between me and the boss. That’s the only thing I don’t comment on. Ever. It’s executive privilege.”
At 8 a.m. on January 11, we went wheels up from Joint Base Andrews aboard Chris Miller’s C-32, the military version of a Boeing 757. Patel was on the plane, along with a retinue of bodyguards, communications specialists, intelligence analysts, and those charged with safeguarding the zippered bags containing some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets. Miller, even as we toured sensitive military and nuclear installations, was low-key, sporting hiking pants, a dry-fit shirt, a waterproof jacket, and a baseball cap. He looked and sounded like someone you’d meet at Home Depot.
We stopped in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, home to the Y-12 National Security Complex, a sprawling site that has been nicknamed the Secret City. Wearing Geiger counters to gauge their radiation exposure, Miller, Patel, and Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette visited a building where nuclear weapon components are assembled and disassembled. The stated purpose for the visit: to assess the viability of America’s nuclear arsenal. While we were on the ground, President Trump was en route to Alamo, Texas, for what he considered his own national security event of sorts: checking out the border wall, which he promised would keep Mexican “rapists” at bay.
By the time we arrived at an airfield near Nashville, law enforcement officials back in Washington were warning of armed protests planned in all 50 state capitals. In Smyrna, at a meeting with members of the Tennessee National Guard, Miller worked the room like a stand-up comic. Only minutes after the event had started, however, a military aide solemnly approached Miller, who was seated on the edge of the stage, and whispered in his ear. That was the moment, Miller later told me, when he gave the order to arm the National Guardsmen protecting the Capitol and members of Congress. “I have responsibility for everything, remember. Something goes wrong, I own it completely, 110%.” He also acknowledged the need to delegate. “You want to push [authorization down to] the people on the ground that are seeing things happen when I’m sitting at the Pentagon or in my plane. So I made that decision to push it down to Secretary of the Army McCarthy so that they could move faster.” In short order the Guard’s presence in Washington and other capitals ballooned.
That evening, over beers and a two-for-$20 special at an Applebee’s near Fort Campbell, Patel was reflective. “They thought we’d blow the place up,” he recalled. “But we’re just getting shit done. Ended three wars. Went to Damascus for [American journalist and hostage] Austin Tice.” And even during a lame-duck stewardship of the Pentagon, he added, “Chris and I said, ‘We’re going to fly every week. Fuel the jet.’” In truth the troops may be fewer, but the battles are far from over; and Austin Tice is still not home.
The following morning Miller, Patel, and crew flew to STRATCOM, at Offutt Air Force Base. It was January 12, and the House was beginning to debate articles of impeachment. Offutt, located on the outskirts of Omaha, is home to the U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles, over a dozen “boomers” (stealthy submarines), and dozens more long-range bombers. Exactly a week after the Capitol attack, as I sat inside STRATCOM—whose mission is to deter and, if necessary, annihilate America’s foreign adversaries—it was not lost on me that we had become a nation under threat from within.
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At one point Miller described for me the paranoid national security decision-making environment he encountered when he took the job. “There was this thought that, like, Oh, my God, if we present options, the batshit-crazy president’s going to go Dr. Strangelove on us, and we’re going to end up in a major war.” But for all of Trump’s shortcomings, he at least deserves credit, in Miller’s mind, for moving to end what had become “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq. Miller said that he earned the respect of DOD’s interagency partners—and a long leash from the president—by coming to the table with a range of solutions to thorny threats. Many of his predecessors, he argued, came to the table with limited options. “We’d be like, ‘A, B, C, D, E, F—we can go from everything from thermonuclear war to absolutely doing information operations. What are you thinking?’”
Following a briefing on nuclear readiness, we taxied out and paused short of the runway as an E-4B “doomsday plane” took off in front of us. It felt like an omen. After all, the plane had earned its moniker for its ability to withstand a nuclear blast and to provide a secure aerial command center for defense secretaries. Roughly 30 minutes into our flight, the video flashed the breaking news. America’s commander in chief had been impeached…again. But those on board seemed to take little notice. They simply continued reading sensitive documents and operating communications gear, consumed with the yeomen’s work of the security state.
That evening I went to Miller’s suite at the Broadmoor, in Colorado Springs, a hotel located at the base of Cheyenne Mountain—home to the blast-proof bunker known as the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, featured in films like WarGames and Interstellar. With his boss in legal and political jeopardy, I asked Miller how he was feeling. “Focused, obviously. Have to compartmentalize because it’s like being in combat. When you take casualties, you’re just like, it’s horrible. But I’ll think about that later over some drinks when I get home.” He seemed remarkably calm: “I refuse to take the bait and get panicky. I have to portray that this is the Department of Defense. That’s my Bill Belichick. Do your damn job. And I’m not going to go out and make some statement…. Right now the country just needs to take a quaalude.”
On the leg back to D.C., Miller invited me up to his cabin. I asked him about the $1.5 trillion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (a deeply flawed system I had covered at length for Vanity Fair)—a purportedly off-the-record conversation that someone in the Pentagon decided to simply post on the Defense Department’s website. What did this costly, badly flawed aircraft—27 years in the making—say about the Pentagon’s spending priorities? Miller started laughing before letting loose: “I cannot wait to leave this job, believe me. Talk about a wicked problem! I wanted to take that one on. F-35 is the case study…. [T]hat investment, for that capability that we’re never supposed to use…I’m like, ‘We have created a monster.’”
On Friday evening Miller greeted me in a suit and tie at his front door. He explained that he and Patel had been to the Oval Office a few hours before. CNN, the day before, had reported: “Mike Pence is acting like a de facto president right now, going to a FEMA briefing [while the president sits in the White House and] “has a pity party.” Other news outlets, noting the number of officials resigning, would describe the president as isolated, despondent, and mainly talking to like-minded sycophants. I inquired whether anyone was running the White House.
Miller insisted the president had been in good spirits. “I know the media portrays it a little differently,” he insisted, though he might have been putting on his game face with me. “I got to take the guy’s temperature, you know. Make sure that we’re in a good place. And Im very, very comfortable, very confident.” I then showed him the long-lens photo of the MyPillow CEO, Lindell, coming into the White House—with a memo referencing “martial law.” He laughed, quickly did the math, and figured he and Patel left the grounds before the picture was taken. When I inquired about the meaning of the words “Move Kash Patel to CIA Acting” on Lindell’s briefing papers, he chuckled: “Maybe he’s got a new job then, right? Get out of my hair. That’s funny. That’s MyPillow guy? Huh, okay.”
Sitting on his couch at the end of a surreal week, he finally took off the gloves. His target? The Defense Department itself, the largest organization in the world—and one he has served in various ways since he was 18. “This fucking place is rotten. It’s rotten.” Miller’s gravest concern, he said, involved a bedrock principle of American democracy: civilian control of the military. “When the system is weighted towards the Joint Staff and the geographic combatant commanders against civilian control, you know, we’ve got to rethink this.” He expressed a belief that by “idolizing and fetishizing” the top brass, members of Congress had ignored an erosion over time in the chain of command.
“We’re in a crisis mode,” Cohen had told me earlier. He said he and others had discovered that the Joint Chiefs were creating their own “security compartments” containing operational planning details “for the express purpose of hiding key information from career civilian and political leaders in the Pentagon”—up to and including the secretary of Defense. Talk about a deep state. “That means that policymakers were basing their decisions on partial information. It’s very dangerous and irresponsible, and that’s something I’ve actually highlighted in my conversations with [Biden’s] transition team.” I’ll admit it sounded loopy. To me it had all the elements of a Trump fever dream: The military and intelligence establishment was somehow scheming against the renegades. That is, until two other senior national security officials—with Miller and company—confirmed Cohen’s assertion.
“The entire system,” Miller stated, “the intelligence community [included], is complicit in setting up all these compartments—so that only very select people actually have perspective and access to the entire picture. And then your question is, ‘Well, who are these people that have the complete picture?’ I felt like I finally did as acting SECDEF—to a point. I’m sure there’s still some stuff that was being compartmented. But I don’t know that for a fact.”
Congressional hearings and blue-ribbon commissions may inch us closer to the truth of what happened during Trump’s roller-coaster term in office—especially what happened on January 6, 2021. Then again, amid the detritus the president left behind, truth is ephemeral. So, too, are the reputations of those who have served in this administration. Already, the tide is turning against many loyal Trumpers—even those who left their posts in the administration’s closing weeks.
As Secretary Miller and I were winding up our conversation, his wife, Kate, who had overheard bits and pieces, walked in, visibly upset. She had apparently been doomscrolling in the other room, watching news reports about Miller’s frank comments—prompted by my question about the F-35—that had been posted on the Pentagon’s website. Turning toward me, she said, “Forgive me for speaking frankly, but this is very upsetting for me. You see where we live. His reputation is all that we have. And I am very concerned that he’s being exploited right now. He’s done his job. He’s done a very good job. Nobody gives a shit.” She then addressed her husband, “I think we need to just put a line under it and say, ‘We’re done.’”
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