White House now blaming Pentagon "paperwork" for Trump's failure to honor fallen US troops

Donald Trump had time to go golfing five times since four U.S. troops were killed by an ISIS ambush in Niger on Oct., 4. But Trump didn’t have time to reach out to the mourning military families because the White House had to wait on Pentagon “paperwork,” according to the latest administration spin.

In a man-made crisis of leadership that continues to metastasize, Trump and his team struggle to offer up any rationale reason for his shocking silence about the killed Special Forces troops. This, at a time when Trump seems obsessed with trolling the NFL about the proper way to honor U.S. troops during the pre-game national anthem.

He’s also been busy bragging that he’s defeating ISIS. But it was an ISIS group that stunned the U.S. military when it launched the deadly Niger raid.

On Monday, Trump confirmed he still hadn’t offered up condolences to the families. Trump also hasn’t used his prolific Twitter account to honor the men, let alone acknowledge their deaths. Pressed for an answer why, Trump immediately lied and claimed President Obama also refused to contact families who lost loved ones killed in action.

That fabrication was angrily knocked down:

Stop the damn lying – you’re the President. I went to Dover AFB with 44 and saw him comfort the families of both the fallen military & DEA. pic.twitter.com/HhE4KbTBkJ

— Eric Holder (@EricHolder) October 17, 2017

Now the White House is embracing the dog-ate-my-homework spin: It’s all the Pentagon’s fault.

From The New York Times: “A senior official said Mr. Trump had planned to speak sooner to the families, but the White House had to wait until the Pentagon’s paperwork was completed.”

Really? Trump’s team is claiming it took the Pentagon 12 days to identify the families of the killed? That’s absurd because the Department of Defense released information about the men soon after they were killed. Some of the troops have already been buried, and their funerals were covered in the local media, but the White House wants Americans to believe the Pentagon nearly two weeks later was still nailing down the “paperwork”?

Meanwhile, Trump on Monday claimed he had written letters to the families “over the weekend” and that the letters would go out “today or tomorrow.” That suggested any pending Pentagon paperwork had been completed but that Trump was still slow-walking the entire process.

The four men who were killed were Staff Sgt. Bryan Black, 35; Staff Sgt. Jeremiah Johnson, 39; Staff Sgt. Dustin Wright, 29, of Lyons; and Sgt. La David Johnson, 25. All four were assigned to the Army’s 3rd Special Forces Group.

Questions continue to swirl around the deadly Niger raid, and what went wrong on what was supposed to be a routine patrol mission.

“On Monday, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, joined a growing chorus calling for a review of the circumstances leading to the ambush,” the Times reported.

More and more, it appears that Trump’s deliberate silence is part of a larger cover-up.