John Kelly Says President Obama Did Not Call His Family When His Son Died -- But ‘That Was Not a Criticism’

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said Thursday that former President Barack Obama did not call Kelly’s family when his son was killed at the age of 29 while serving in Afghanistan in 2010.

“Obama did not call my family,” Kelly said during a somber appearance in the White House briefing room, according to tweets by the Wall Street Journal‘s Rebecca Ballhaus and other reporters?.

“That was not a criticism,” the retired Marine general added. “That was just to simply say I don’t believe President Obama called.”

The Washington Post and other outlets have reported that, according to White House records, Kelly and his wife were invited to a “Gold Star” breakfast in May 2011, and sat at then-First Lady Michelle Obama‘s table.

Kelly’s comments come after President Trump, facing backlash for falsely claiming that Obama did not call the families of fallen soldiers during his presidency, suggested that reporters “ask General Kelly, did he get a call from Obama.”

The comments drew Kelly’s slain son into a controversy surrounding Trump’s recent phone call to the family of Army Sgt. La David Johnson, who was killed in Niger in an ambush earlier this month.

Trump has been under fire for reportedly telling Johnson’s grieving widow that her husband “knew what he signed up for” — a story first told by Rep. Frederica Wilson and later confirmed by Johnson’s mother, both of whom were listening to Trump’s call on speakerphone. Johnson’s mother, Cowanda Jones-Johnson, told The Washington Post that Trump “disrespected” her son and family.

Kelly says he advised Trump on the calls to Gold Star families, and shared what he was told when he got the news of his son’s death.

“[My son] was doing exactly what he wanted to do when he was killed,” Kelly recalled. “He knew what he was getting into by joining that one percent. He knew what the possibilities were, because we were at war.”

Kelly also said Thursday that he was “stunned” by Wilson’s criticism of Trump’s comments to Johnson’s widow, and that a member of Congress listened in on the conversation. (Wilson, a Democrat from Florida, is a personal friend of the Johnson family.)

Kelly said that after Wilson went public with her account of the conversation, he had to collect his thoughts by visiting the graves of “the finest men or women on this Earth” at Arlington National Cemetery for more than an hour, The New York Times reported.

“I was stunned when I came to work yesterday morning, and brokenhearted, at what I saw a member of Congress doing, a member of Congress who listened in on a phone call from the president of the United States to a young wife, and in his way tried to express that opinion that [Johnson is] a brave man, a fallen hero,” Kelly said. “He knew what he was getting himself into because he enlisted. There’s no reason to enlist. He enlisted, and he was where he wanted to be, exactly where he wanted to be with exactly the people he wanted to be with when his life was taken. That was the message. That was the message that was transmitted.”

“It stuns me that a member of Congress would have listened in on that conversation,” Kelly continued. “Absolutely stuns me, and I thought, at least that was sacred.”

Wilson soon responded to Kelly’s comments, saying: “John Kelly’s trying to keep his job. He will say anything.”

“There were other people who heard what I heard,” she added, according to Politico’s Marc Caputo.