"My family and I are deeply grateful for the President's action today," Milley said in a statement to USA Today provided by a spokesperson.

Trump has often criticized his former top general, whose portrait was taken down at the Pentagon just after the new administration took office.

A portrait of retired Gen. Mark Milley, a target of President Donald Trump's wrath, disappeared from a Pentagon hallway hours after the inauguration.

Andrés was removed from the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition. Milley will no longer serve on the National Infrastructure Advisory Council.

Former President Joe Biden greeted President Donald Trump at the White House in advance of Monday’s inauguration with a conciliatory gesture, telling him and first lady Melania Trump: “Welcome home.” Trump ended his first day back in that home by posting a sneering message boasting of how his team was hunting down hundreds of Biden appointees to throw out of office.

Gen. Mark Milley, the now-retired former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, commented on the pardon he received in Biden's final hours in office.

Former President Biden’s preemptive pardon for retired Gen. Mark Milley, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will give the retired military official a shield against any action

The portrait of Milley hung in an ornate hallway that is dedicated to the history of the Joint Chiefs and displays 19 other paintings of all other prior chairmen going back to Gen. Omar Bradley.

Milley's newly unveiled portrait was removed from the hallways of the Pentagon hours after President Donald Trump was inaugurated.

The heads of the Jan. 6 committee say they're grateful for the decision by President Joe Biden to pardon them “not for breaking the law but for upholding it.”

President Biden noted that the "should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing."

The Pentagon pulled down a portrait of retired US Army General and frequent Donald Trump critic Mark Milley just hours after Trump’s Monday inauguration in Washington, DC, witnesses told Reuters.