Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Defense Sec. Call Bounty Story “Uncorroborated”

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Sunday, Dec. 29, 2019. PICTURED: Secretary of Defense Mark Esper is joined by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, left, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley, as he addresses reporters in Florida.

WASHINGTON, July 9th, 2020. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Miley and Defense Secretary Esper said before a House Armed Services Committee hearing that the supposed Russian-Taliban-bounty intelligence reports were “uncorroborated” by defense intelligence.

“As of today, right now, we don’t have cause and effect linkages to a Russian bounty program causing U.S. Military casualties,” Milley said.

The supposedly-linked transfers of money from the Russian military to Taliban-linked individuals in reward for the deaths of American servicemen in Afghanistan, that was first reported on by the New York Times, has received a lot of skepticism, both by intelligence officials who claim it was of “low confidence” and by journalists.

“Anonymous U.S. intelligence officials who were ‘briefed on the matter,’” allegedly also briefed the president on the reports despite the fact that no single intelligence office, and certainly none of the them together, had placed high confidence what was supposedly a pile of unsorted financial transactions from local money runners, and other bits and bobs.

The President’s daily brief is the most classified piece of information in the country, and whether or not Trump knew about this story, and did nothing, is one of the key matters which led a bipartisan coalition in the Senate to amend the National Defense Authorization for 2021 to include a blocking maneuver on Trump’s desire for a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan before the November election.

Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, the commander of U.S. Central Command, and Gen. Scott Miller, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, first encountered the story in January, according to Esper’s testimony.

“Neither thought the reports were credible as they dug into them,” said Esper, having himself learned of the report in February.