on a busy day, we ll get about 2600 pieces of mail coming in. going out we probably send out half that, 1300 pieces. daily. then we ll go to the cutting machine and open them all up. and we start the inspection process. we don t read all of the mail. however, we do scan the mail. we open it, inspect it and once it passes our inspection, we go ahead and reclose it and send it to the inmates. we re looking for gang affiliations, signs, markers on the envelopes. searching for contraband, of course. most of the mail corporal johnson and his staff process are letters written from one inmate to another, some 500 such letters per day. baron ochoa is a frequent user of the inmate-to-inmate mail
department and not the state department, of course there s a loss of trust. they don t trust the president. well, it s an extremely unsettling situation. the president is impulsive. he does not have a staff process yet. general kelly has been incapable of really pulling that together. we ought to thank god we have mattis. he s been able to recruit sensible people to work with him. one of the most humiliating photos i ve seen was jared kushner head of delegation to the iraqi government on one side was the former bodyguard and on the other side, the chairman of the jcs. a 37 year old in charge of transformation of government and middle foreign policy with no experience at all helping lead our government.
the most overwhelming aspect is not the mail itself, it s the volume of the mail. on a busy day, we ll get about 2600 pieces of mail coming in. going out we probably send out half that, 1300 pieces. daily. then we ll go to the cutting machine and open them all up. and we start the inspection process. we don t read all of the mail. however, we do scan the mail. we open it, inspect it and once it passes our inspection, we go ahead and reclose it and send it to the inmates. we re looking for gang affiliations, signs, markers on the envelopes. searching for contraband, of course. most of the mail corporal johnson and his staff process are letters written from one inmate to another, some 500 such
he listens in on conversations between cabinet secretaries and the president. he has booted lingering staff members out of high level meetings and ordered the doors of the oval office closed to discourage strays. tim is joining me, cnn presidential historian and general mark hurtling, who served more than 15 months in iraq with general kelly, did multiple operations together, and so general, just beginning with you, just more great detail out of this piece too, how the times is saying general kelly had told his new employees that he was hired to moong manaanage staff, not the president. you know the man. does that sound like general kelly to you? well, first, brooke, what i d say i m smiling because it sounds like what every chief of staff does in any military organization, what they should do, in fact, what they re trained to do. but yeah, john kelly is that kind of guy. he is very pragmatic. he s very disciplined. he brings rigor to a staff process. i ve seen him to do that.
he knows how to work with bosses. he s worked with defense secretaries and diplomats so he knows these kind of things but he can only do so much. he can only provide that discipline and rigor to the staff process and getting the information to his boss. what his boss does with it, he can t control. right. tim, i was quoting james baker earlier this week and he was saying, and i m paraphrasing, the best chief of staffs are those who focuses on the of staff part of the title and not the chiefs piece. you tell me, you look at presidential history. what is truly the role of the chief of staff and especially what makes one successful? well, making the trains run on time is very important. but i think it s also important to keep in mind that there s some management of the chief executive involved. but nobody no unelected person can go before the cameras and say, my job is to manage the most powerful person in the world who s been elected by the american people. so, i think if you look