Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly defended Confederate-era monuments and hailed Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as an “honorable man” in an interview on Fox News on Monday night. When asked about calls to remove a plaque memorializing Lee from a church in Virginia, Kelly said it would be a “mistake” for society’s current ideas of “right and wrong” to be applied to Confederate leaders. “Robert E. Lee was an honorable man who gave up his country to fight for his state,” Kelly told host Laura Ingraham. While Lee has been revered for decades for his battlefield tactics, historical documents have shown that he not only owned slaves but treated them with cruelty. Kelly, already facing criticism for his refusal to apologize for false comments about Rep. Frederica Wilson, also blamed the Civil War on a “lack of ability to compromise.”