President Donald Trump did not know about a request to hide the USS John S. McCain during his state visit to Japan, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Sunday.
"The president didn't know about it, I didn’t know about it," Mulvaney said on “Fox News Sunday,“ adding "literally hundreds of people are involved in moving the president overseas.
""The president's feelings about the former senator are well-known," Mulvaney added. "The fact that a low-level person might have asked the question shouldn't surprise anybody. We think it's much ado about nothing."
The U.S. Navy confirmed Saturday that a "request was made" to "minimize the visibility" of the McCain warship during the president's recent state visit to Japan. The Wall Street Journal first reported last week that the White House wanted to move the destroyer "out of sight."
The warship is named for the late Sen. John McCain, his father and his grandfather. The Arizona senator died in August 2018.
Mulvaney was asked on “Fox News Sunday“ if anyone in the White House would be disciplined over the move, but dismissed the premise of the question.
"For what? For asking an innocuous question about that? No," he said. "Does someone get disciplined at Fox News for saying that so-and-so does not want to sit next to so-and-so at a meeting? No. Again this is a minor issue that we think the media is trying to make into a larger matter."
He elaborated that there are many people involved in the lead-up to the president's overseas travel and that any one of them could have "asked this question.
""If a 23- or 24-year-old person says, 'Look, is it really a good idea for this ship to be in the background?' — that is not an unreasonable question to have and it certainly is not something that takes up two minutes of national television on Sunday," he said.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine