It’s a tough question to think why John Kelly would have remembered it so negatively. People go to a lot of events. I can believe he misremembered it and thought it was about getting the money.
Perhaps. But I think it’s more believable that Kelly manufactured a Trumped-up charge against Rep, Wilson because he (and the Trump Administration) would rather talk about that, than talk about how Trump’s travel ban on Chad the Trump Administration’s intelligence failures and poor planning may have led to the attack that killed Sgt. Johnson and three more US soldiers.
Correction/Edited to Add (10/20/2017, ~ 2:35pm,):
Laura Seay, a political scientist who specializes in Africa’s Great Lakes region, makes a convincing argument that putting Chad on the travel ban couldn’t have had anything to do with the attack that killed Sgt. Johnson and three other US soldiers.
Adam L. Silverman, a military expert and analyst who blogs at Balloon-Juice, further posits that:
… the two real lines of inquiry into what went wrong are 1) the seeming intelligence failure and 2) the abysmal lack of support available for 3rd Special Forces Group Soldiers and their host country partners in case something went wrong. … The investigators also need to determine who decided that it was acceptable to deploy around 800 US military personnel with no close air support and aviation based casualty evacuation.
I have edited this comment to reflect that analysis and the above information.
