It is abundantly clear you have to be an accomplished liar to serve as a top member of President Joe Biden’s team, but now it appears you may also have to be a traitor. For a general to secretly work with the enemy in an attempt to undermine a sitting president borders on treason and is, at least, treachery.

An investigation should begin now. If reports of Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, going behind former President Donald Trump’s back and working with a high-level Chinese official without the president’s permission are verified, he has violated the one of the most fundamental principles of a Republican democracy: civilian control of the military.

Before “traitor-gate” came to light, Milley had already called his leadership into question with “woke” policies that appear more focused on making the military a happy place for transgender soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines than a well-trained and well-equipped fighting force. Forcing troops to sit through sessions in which they are indoctrinated concerning white privilege hardly builds teamwork or unity. These “woke” policies make Milley an unfit chairman, but recent reports of his activities at the end of the Trump administration raise the specter of Benedict Arnold.

It has recently been reported by several news outlets that Milley secretly spoke with his counterpart in the misnamed People’s Liberation Army, Gen. Li Zuocheng, twice to express concerns that Trump might spark a war with China. Milley is reported to have reassured his counterpart he would alert him ahead of time if an attack from the U.S. was imminent. This is as bad as if Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Adolf Hitler of the time and place of the D-Day invasion. The various news reports were based on a new book by Robert Costa and Bob Woodward, “Peril,” which includes interviews with more than 200 sources. If these reports are true, Milley should be court-martialed and drummed out of the service.

Then there is the issue of lying to Congress. Requiring the secretary of state to give a truthful account of the debacle in Afghanistan would have provided a measure of accountability for the American people. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, that didn’t happen. To avoid accountability, Secretary of State Antony Blinken lied to Congress and the American people. Rather than tell the truth, Blinken reverted to form and did what this administration has done since day one: shifted responsibility to the previous administration, blaming Trump. No matter how badly this administration errs, its fallback position is always the same: Avoid accountability by blaming Trump. In the process, the lies keep piling up.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee should have held Blinken in contempt for blatantly lying to Congress. Instead, they let him get away with the most contemptible performance before a congressional committee in recent memory. Rather than hold Blinken and Biden accountable for overseeing the worst military and humanitarian disaster of the century, committee members allowed the secretary of state to get away with claiming, “We inherited a deadline. We did not inherit a plan.”

It would be difficult to conjure up a more disingenuous, hypocritical response than this one. After ignoring or changing everything Trump put in place during his term in office, Blinken expects the American public to believe the Biden administration was somehow hamstrung by a so-called inherited deadline. Absurd. Blinken’s nose grew longer by the minute during his testimony.

A top-ranking general who may have committed treason, a secretary of state who makes Pinocchio look honest and a president who lies habitually. The three would make good cellmates.

COPYRIGHT 2021 OLIVER L. NORTH AND DAVID L. GOETSCH