President Donald Trump is "awesome," according to Clint Lorance, one of the three military men the president recently pardoned, but he needs a team around him who is "watching his back."
"Mr. President, I wish you had a better team around you," Lorance commented on Fox News' "Fox and Friends."
"You need more people watching your back, and I think you don't have a lot of that. That is absolutely unfortunate, and that infuriates me to no end."
Lorance added that if people are working in the White House or the government and they don't agree with the president, then they should "go home."
On Friday, Trump announced he was ordering that Lorance, a former Army lieutenant, be released from the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was six years into a 19-year sentence for the murders of two civilians.
Trump also ordered that murder charges be dropped against Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, an Army Special Forces officer whose trial was scheduled for December, and reversed the demotion of Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who was acquitted of murder charges but convicted of a lesser offense over the summer.
Lorance also responded to people at the Pentagon who complained Trump's action would impact military justice, noting that "presidents all the way back to the beginning of our republic have been getting involved in the military justice system."
He also said he thinks that once any member of the military must be confirmed by the Senate for a promotion, they are no longer a soldier, but "a politician, and so I think they lose some of their values," said Lorance. "They certainly lose a lot of their respect from their subordinates when they do what they did to me, which was, you know, throw me under the bus."
He also spoke out about former Vice President Joe Biden's complaint that Trump's action betrayed the rule of law, calling it a "partisan answer." He added that he doubts that Biden, as a "patriotic man with a son in the military" really believes what he said.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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