Aides Asked Her to Undercut Trump to 'Save Country': Haley

Tillerson and Kelly wanted UN ambassador to join resistance, book says
By Bob Cronin,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 10, 2019 12:25 PM CST
Trump Aides Recruited Her to Join Resistance: Haley
Nikki Haley wrote that she declined to join an effort to undermine the president.   (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Rex Tillerson and John Kelly were trying to save the country by undermining President Trump, Nikki Haley says, and they wanted her to help. The former UN ambassador makes the claims about Trump's former secretary of state and chief of staff in a new memoir, With All Due Respect, the Washington Post reports. "Kelly and Tillerson confided in me that when they resisted the president, they weren’t being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country," wrote Haley, who said she declined to join their resistance. The way they saw it, Haley wrote, "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." Haley, who has been mentioned as GOP presidential candidate, has been giving speeches at $200,000 a pop—and, evidently, writing a book—since resigning from her UN job a year ago.

Tillerson, who Haley said told her people would die if Trump's decisions were carried out, has not commented on her claims. But Kelly said if the accusation is that 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." Haley is still a Trump supporter, and she includes no deep criticisms of him in her book. Administration officials are obligated to execute Trump's policies, she said. "To undermine a president is really a very dangerous thing," Haley said in an interview with CBS. "And it goes against the Constitution, and it goes against what the American people want. And it was offensive." (More Nikki Haley stories.)

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