The mother of the slain football player and Army Ranger Pat Tillman sought to warn President Obama against making General Stanley McChrystal his commander in Afghanistan.
Mary Tillman said in an unpublished interview this year that she wrote to Obama and called Senators and members of Congress seeking to block McChrystal's appointment when she learned that he was under consideration for the post.
She called the lack of deliberation leading to his appointment "disgusting" in the interview, given before today's Rolling Stone article spurred intense tension between the general and the White House. An audio recording of the interview was provided to POLITICO by the interviewer, who asked to remain anonymous.
McChrystal has been accused of involvement in covering up of the fact that Tillman had been shot by his own comrades, having approved a citation for a posthumous medal that attributed his death to "enemy fire," though the general also penned a memo warning the White House against describing the circumstance of Tillman's death for fear of future embarrassment.
An official investigation blamed McChrystal for “inaccurate and misleading assertions” in the formal recommendation of Tillman for a Silver Star.
Mary Tillman said she emailed Obama a short letter saying that McChrystal was not what he seemed.
She received no response to the letter and little response to her contacts with members of Congress, she said in the interview, though Senator John McCain called her to seek suggestion for questions to ask at a hearing with McChrystal. Tillman declined to provide them because she'd read that McCain had already decided to back McChrystal.
Mary Tillman didn't respond to a request for comment through the the Weinstein Company, which is distributing a documentary about her son and the circumstances surrounding his death and the subsequent alleged cover-up.
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