Soon after Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma joined the Armed Services Committee in early 2023, King Abdullah II of Jordan spoke with the panel behind closed doors during a visit to Washington.
When it was his turn to speak, Mr. Mullin, a recent arrival from the House, surprised others in the room by calling the king a hero, recalling how Abdullah had once sent his personal helicopter to rescue Mr. Mullin and other Americans, according to four people familiar with the exchange, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe remarks intended to be private.
Mr. Mullin offered few other details, saying only that the group he was with could not get help from the American military and that they had bled all over the king’s helicopter. The king maintained an impassive demeanor before an aide jumped in to redirect the conversation to the general importance of cooperation between the two countries, two of the people said. Witnesses were left baffled.
Mr. Mullin, who is now President Trump’s nominee for homeland security secretary, has a history of suggesting that he has firsthand familiarity with overseas war-zone operations, despite having never served in the military. His unexplained remarks have raised questions about his experiences, which he has declined to discuss in detail.
The circumstances of the episode that Mr. Mullin relayed in 2023 remain unclear. But public records and remarks during his open testimony at his confirmation hearing on Wednesday offered further glimpses of claims about unusual overseas travel that could be potential clues as the Senate prepares to vote on whether to confirm him to a powerful cabinet role.
After Mr. Mullin suggested on Fox News this month that he was familiar with the “smell” of war, Representative Pat Ryan, a New York Democrat and Army veteran, wrote on social media: “Did I miss the part of your bio where you served in combat (or served in uniform at all??). Call of Duty doesn’t count.” At his confirmation hearing, Senator Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat and former Navy Reserve officer, told Mr. Mullin his statements “quite frankly are confusing and they are inconsistent.”
Mr. Peters asked if Mr. Mullin had ever been involved as an employee, a contractor or a volunteer for the Defense or State Departments or any “other U.S. agency” — a common euphemism for the C.I.A. Mr. Mullin replied “no,” but said he believed he could clear up a misunderstanding.
He then said he had gone on a classified trip in 2016, after receiving specialized training the previous year. He described the trip as not “a mission” but rather “an official travel with specific deals or specific fact-finding, just like any official travel is, that they wanted clarification on.”
He did not say who “they” were, and what facts his help was needed to clarify. During the 2015-16 Congress, Mr. Mullin said, he sat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Stressing that the trip was classified, he declined to provide details like the location of the trip or its specific purpose. But he appeared to let slip a partial date: “This started in 2015, it ended in mid-tw— — a little late in 2016.”
The Sept. 22, 2016, edition of the Congressional Record contains an expense report Mr. Mullin filed for foreign travel. It states that he spent $15,237 in taxpayer funds for a trip to Jordan from Aug. 16-19, 2016. A search of the Congressional Record revealed no other foreign travel expenses that year for Mr. Mullin.
Jordan is not a war zone, but it is a helicopter ride from southern Syria, which was in the middle of a civil war in 2016. No other lawmaker was listed as participating in the Jordan trip.
It is not clear if that 2016 trip to Jordan is the same 2016 trip that he referred to in his testimony this week, and whether there is a connection to the story he relayed in the 2023 meeting about having been rescued in the Jordanian king’s helicopter.
The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment. The Jordanian Embassy declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Mr. Mullin’s Senate office provided excerpts from his testimony on Wednesday but declined to comment further. His former chief of staff from that period also declined to comment.
In the last month, Mr. Mullin has publicly alluded to past experiences being in a war zone. He said on Fox News on March 2 that “war is ugly, it smells bad, and if anybody’s ever been there, and been able to smell the war that’s happening around you and taste it and feel it in your nostrils and hear it, it’s something that you’ll never forget and it’s ugly.”
The next day, when a podcast host called him a military veteran, Mr. Mullin clarified that “I did special assignments outside of D.O.D., now D.O.W. — I, I never wore the uniform or the flag on my, on my, on my shoulder.” He added, “I’ve been in the same area, but two totally — guys that signed the contract, was, I got to work alongside of those guys and they are phenomenal individuals.”
When Mr. Peters pressed him on those remarks and Mr. Mullin talked about a 2016 trip, he also said that to prepare for it he had undergone SERE training, meaning the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program.
“In 2015, I was asked to train with a very small contingency and go to a certain area which was scheduled for 2016,” he said. “During that time, I was asked to go through — had to meet certain training qualifications, certain qualifications, had to go through SERE training. The training and stuff was kind of fun. The SERE training was absolutely awful.”
The military created SERE after the Korean War, when airmen who had been shot down behind enemy lines and captured were tortured and forced to produce propaganda against the United States. The program trains troops to evade capture or, if taken prisoner by a force that does not obey the Geneva Conventions, to resist coercive interrogation.
Other members of Congress have said they had never heard of a sitting lawmaker being put through SERE training.
Mr. Mullin added that to his recollection, there were “only four people read in on it,” meaning they were authorized to know the details of the trip.
Mr. Mullin did not say who the four people were. Nor did he identify any department or agency that, in the Obama administration era, had deemed its details classified. Congress does not have the authority to deem information classified.
Mr. Peters expressed skepticism, saying the F.B.I. had queried the Pentagon, the State Department and intelligence agencies, and reported that nothing about Mr. Mullin appeared in any of their classified documents.
“So, you’re in no classified document that the federal government has according to the F.B.I., and yet you’re telling me you did all this classified work,” he said.
The committee then reconvened in a secure room for a closed-door session. But Mr. Mullin said he lacked the authority to provide significant detail even in that setting because he had signed a nondisclosure agreement whose terms he did not remember, according to a person familiar with the session.
Mr. Mullin, 48, is a staunch supporter of Mr. Trump. He grew up on his family’s ranch in Westville, Okla., and dropped out of college at 20 to take over his family’s plumbing business.
He later had a brief career as a mixed martial arts fighter, completed an associate degree, hosted a talk radio show about home improvement, and won a House seat in 2012 as a tea-party-style candidate before moving to the Senate in 2023.
During the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, Mr. Mullin tried to enter Afghanistan with a large amount of cash, saying he intended to help a family get out. The State Department and the Pentagon denied his charter plane permission to fly from Tajikistan into Afghanistan given the chaos. Mr. Mullin later called it a private rescue mission, saying he had been accompanied by former military personnel.
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
The post Mullin Said to Have Credited the King of Jordan for a Helicopter Rescue appeared first on New York Times.
