It was February 2017, and according to an email released this week through the Freedom of Information Act, John Kelly was upset.
“Absolutely most insulting conversation I have ever had with anyone,” he complained to an aide. “What an impolite, arrogant woman. She immediately began insulting our people, accusing them of not following the court order, insulting and abusive behavior towards those covered by the pause, blah, blah, blah.”
Kelly is now Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, but at the time of the email, he was serving as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. And the “impolite, arrogant woman?”
That would be U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Democrat from Massachusetts. Through Twitter, journalist David Dayen has released an email in which Warren offers her own version of what happened in that conversation, and it’s worth quoting at length:
“You probably remember: Right after Donald Trump became president, one of his first orders of business was launching an illegal, bigoted Muslim ban.
We all felt powerless at the time. – Republicans had just won the White House and both branches of Congress – but my staff and I wanted to do something about it. So we tried to get answers from the Department of Homeland Security about their policy of illegally detaining Massachusetts residents (and their family members) at Boston Logan Airport.
There was one problem: Trump’s new director of Homeland Security -- John Kelly – wouldn’t return our calls and emails. My staff emailed back and forth with his staff, but we couldn’t get them to set up a call or answer our questions. When I finally did get on the phone with John Kelly, I asked if he had an office number that I could use in the future to get in touch more quickly.
He brushed me off, directing me to to the main line listed on the Department of Homeland Security’s website (really). Even worse, he bizarrely insisted that I’d made the whole thing up and we’d never tried to reach him in the first place.
I happened to be looking at the emails between his staff and my staff when he said this, so I started reading them to him. He accused me again of making it all up. My policy staffers were in the room. And to this day, I’ve never seen so many jaws drop in unison. It was one of the first times we saw “alternative facts” so up close and personal. And one of the first times we saw how truly dysfunctional the executive branch had become – and how quickly.
So what happened next? You guessed it – I persisted. I asked again for his number. He hemmed and hawed, and he again tried to give me the department’s main line. Let’s just say that’s when the conversation really started getting awkward – and that I persisted longer than he did. Eventually he didn’t just give me his office number, he gave me his cell number.
Before we got off the phone, I gave him something back for his troubles – a message on behalf of the American people that it was time to follow the court order and allow people stranded abroad to board planes into Logan International Airport.
Was I tough on John Kelly in that phone call? You bet I was. And apparently he didn’t like it.”
Before joining the Trump administration, Kelly was a four-star general in the U.S. Marine Corps, and he is infamous for his own brusque, aggressive manner. So I very much doubt that Warren, a Harvard law professor, gave him a worse chewing out than he ever got in his 31-year career as a Marine. If she did, then color me impressed.
Instead, two other factors explain Kelly’s reaction. The first is that he knew he deserved it.
As you may recall, that first iteration of Trump’s Muslim ban had been a bureaucratic, legal, constitutional and political screw-up of major proportions. It had been drafted in secret in the White House by anti-Muslim hardliners Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, without consultation or preparation with lawyers or the agencies involved. Its surprise announcement and attempted instant implementation created utter chaos at airports all over the world.
Travel visas were canceled for Iraqis who had risked their lives as translators for the U.S. military, had waited years for permission to come here with their families, had sold off everything to make the trip and were about to board airplanes. Foreign-born physicians, academics and corporate executives were being told the United States was now closed to them. Initially, the travel ban applied even to those who were permanent legal residents of the United States, which meant that green-card holders who had traveled overseas were stranded there and told they could not return home, where their children and spouses awaited them.
The ban had been imposed so suddenly that those who had been in flight to the United States when it was announced were being held in American airports until they could be deported. They were also being denied access to lawyers who could help them. It was all a gargantuan bungle, as federal judges across the country had already ruled. As DHS secretary, Kelly was the man in charge of it.
The other reason that Kelly took it so hard may be gender-related. In his decades in the Marine Corps, he interacted with very few if any women as co-equals or superiors, and he doesn’t seem to handle that well.
A year ago this month, for example, Kelly got into a public spat with U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson, a Democrat from Florida. Rather than tamp down the confrontation, as previous chiefs of staff would have done, Kelly accelerated it. At a White House press briefing, he publicly accused Wilson of having hijacked the 2015 dedication of an FBI building, claiming that she had used the occasion to brag about herself “in the long tradition of empty barrels making the most noise,” instead of honoring the two slain FBI agents for whom the building was named.
However, when a Florida TV station unearthed video of that ceremony, it showed that Wilson's statements bore no resemblance to Kelly's description, and that in fact she had paid lengthy, moving tribute to the sacrifice of the two dead agents. Yet even when caught in an obvious lie, Kelly refused to apologize to Wilson.1
That shouldn’t have been a surprise, not in this administration, not under a president convinced that those most in need of protection in sexual assault cases are men. These guys may glory in their self-image as tough alpha males eager for confrontation, but heaven help them when they run up against an impolite arrogant woman.
1 It's also worth noting that later, as White House chief of staff, Kelly ignored clear warnings from the FBI that his assistant, Rob Porter, had beaten and abused his two ex-wives. When that news broke, multiple White House staff members accused Kelly of lying about his handling of the case.
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