President Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly on Wednesday said he probably would have worked for Hillary Clinton if she had won the 2016 election and asked him to join her team.
Kelly made the comments during a Q&A session at Duke University. The event was closed to cameras, but ABC News obtained an audio recording of the comments.
{mosads}“If Hillary Clinton had won the presidency, and she had called me and said, ‘I really need a good chief of staff here,’ I’d have probably done it,” Kelly said.
“Politics aside, it’s all about governing the country,” he added.
Kelly was also asked about his advice for his successor, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, to which he joked: “Run for it.”
Striking a more serious tone, Kelly then said that Mulvaney should just tell Trump “what he needs to hear.”
Kelly, who left the White House at the end of 2018, has reportedly been highly critical of his time in the White House. The former chief of staff reportedly had disputes with the president over a number of issues, and once called the Trump White House a “miserable place to work.”
A book by former West Wing communications aide Cliff Sims published earlier this year reported that Kelly once said being fired would be the “best day I’ve had since I walked into this place.”