Ma: Widow & I both heard Don’s cruelty
killed in Afghanistan in June. He told The Post that Trump called him a few weeks later, and when he told the President he was struggling financially, the billionaire said he’d send him a personal check for $25,000. “I was just floored,” he told the paper.
But the check never came. White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters told The Post Wednesday it’s now in the mail.
“The check has been sent. It’s disgusting that the media is taking something that should be recognized as a generous and sincere gesture, made privately by the President, and using it to advance the media’s biased agenda,” she said.
After former Obama and Bush administration officials and Gold Star families stepped forward to recall their dealings with families of the fallen following Trump’s initial comments, the President pointed to the death of Kelly’s son, Marine Lt. Robert Kelly, who died while fighting in Afghanistan in 2010.
Speaking Tuesday with Fox News Radio, Trump suggested President Barack Obama never called Kelly, then a Marine general. Sources said the Obamas had invited him to a breakfast for Gold Star families six months later.
Sources told CNN on Wednesday that Kelly was blindsided by Trump bringing up a private conversation they’d had about his son in the interview with Fox.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders decried that the subject had been “politicized,” but didn’t say who’d done so.
As for the call with Johnson’s family, she said there was no recording of it, but there were multiple people in the room with Trump when he made it who “believe that the President was completely respectful, very sympathetic and expressed the condolences of himself and the rest of the country.”
Trump’s handling of the situation prompted Karen Meredith, the Gold Star and Military Families coordinator for VoteVets, who lost her son, 1st Lt. Ken Ballard, in Iraq, to issue an impassioned plea.
“Mr. Trump, stop. Please, just stop. Your actions and words on this entire matter of the fallen in Niger is disgraceful, and unbecoming of a President of the United States and commander-in-chief,” she said. “This is not about you, it is about them.”
Johnson, a father of two with another child on the way, joined the Army in 2014.
He was killed Oct. 4 after U.S. and Niger forces left a meeting with tribal leaders and the group was ambushed.
A GoFundMe page accepting contributions for a college fund for his children raised more than $429,000 in less than a day. A funeral is scheduled for Saturday. Former Obama administration official and veteran Brandon Friedman was stunned by Trump’s comments.
“Every day we wake up to a new low, it seems,” he told the Daily News. “It just shows that the President is out of touch with the military and military families. This is not something that you would ever say. That is not the attitude people take.”