The White House tried to rescind an order to lower flags to half-staff after John McCain died,
The White House tried to rescind an order to lower flags to half-staff after John McCain died, a former official says.
President Trump wasn’t simply furious that the flags on federal buildings had been lowered to half-staff to honor the late Senator John McCain in August 2018: He actually tried to have them raised, again, on all buildings across the country, according to a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security.
In an interview on Friday, the ex-official, Miles Taylor, said he was in Australia on a counterterrorism trip when he and others on the trip learned of Mr. McCain’s death. Soon, said Mr. Taylor, he started getting phone calls from Washington.
“I get someone from the White House, a senior person there, who calls and says, ‘What is going on with the flags. The president is upset, this has gone out too soon and he doesn’t want it to happen.’”
Mr. Taylor, a Trump appointee who served in the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019 and was eventually chief of staff to Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, said he was uncertain of the procedure for lowering flags to half-staff, and spotty Wi-Fi on the trip across the globe had left him somewhat out of the loop on how the president was reacting to Mr. McCain’s death (the White House had lowered its own flag on the presidential complex, only to raise it again, in what was seen at the time as a perplexing break from protocol).
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/09/04/us/trump-vs-biden#the-white-house-tried-to-rescind-an-order-to-lower-flags-to-half-staff-after-john-mccain-died-a-former-official-says
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