President Biden “has blood on his hands” regarding the Afghanistan crisis and the Democrat’s administration has been lying to the American people, a member of the House Intelligence Committee asserted Friday after returning from the region.
U.S. Rep. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., shared details of his overseas trip during an appearance on Fox News’ “Special Report” with Bret Baier.
Mullin told Fox News the White House and Pentagon were lying about the conditions that American citizens in Afghanistan have been facing, and about the purported ease with which Americans reached the Kabul airport while U.S. forces were still on the ground.
The congressman recently returned from a semi-secretive trip to Asia to help bring home Americans stranded in Afghanistan following Biden’s withdrawal process. The lawmaker told Baier that the State Department wasn’t being truthful with the American people, and that he spent nearly a dozen hours on the phone with the department while trying in vain to land in Afghanistan.
“I want to make it very clear. I wasn’t looking to try to get in Afghanistan. … [P]eople started calling me wanting help. And we had been getting friends of mine that were in the service that said ‘Can you help our interpreter get out?’ – which we had a lot of conversations about that. Then we started getting phone calls from people that had family members or friends that were American citizens,” heAt first, Mullin – in his capacity as a House member – sought to sponsor a flight to get 20 Americans out of the Taliban-controlled country and back to the U.S., after several federal agencies turned the group down.
“Everybody kept denying them and then they asked would you go with us? And these are Tier 1 operators. These are DELTA guys, special forces. These guys are legit. I’m nobody. I’m just a congressman,” he said.
He then left the U.S. and ended up circling Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul for hours because his requests to land repeatedly got denied, he said.
“Every time they canceled, the agency that was trying to get us in would give us a new one. They actually went into the tower to say let them land. We were on the phone with them texting. We couldn’t talk. We were texting back and forth and they kept issuing us a new one. And they would never let us in Afghanistan,” he said, adding that he suspects the delay led to the disappearance or death of at least one of the American citizens he was seeking to help rescue.
“Unfortunately, one of our American citizens and her 2-year-old son and I believe it was her father to which I had passports on – we lost contact on because they were at Abbey Gate and a few hours later the Abbey Gate blew up. We haven’t had any contact with them since. I believe it’s because they were caught up in that. So what they did by playing politics on this, for whatever reason – I don’t know who shut us down, but I think it was 100 percent directed from the State Department.”
its a long story