CBS Senior White House and political correspondent Ed O’Keefe blasted the Biden administration’s attempt to “whitewash” any wrongdoing with regard to its handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal Thursday.
O’Keefe was referring to a twelve-page report published by the Biden White House’s National Security Council that gave its assessment of the causes of the botched 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal. The report largely blamed Biden’s predecessor, former President Trump, for what went wrong.
After being asked, “Did they take any responsibility or acknowledge any mistakes made by the Biden Administration?” O’Keefe replied, “The word ‘mistake’ appears once in this 12 page report.”
He noted it came when the document referred to 10 civilians in Kabul being “mistakenly killed” in a drone strike. “That is the one time we see the word ‘mistake’ on an incident in all of this,” he reiterated.
Instead, the CBS reporter said the goal of the report seemed to be to pin the blame on the Trump administration.
“But it spends three and a half pages laying it out and saying it’s the Trump administration’s fault for negotiating with the Taliban, for inviting them to Camp David, for withdrawing U.S. forces to such a level that you would’ve had to have sent more in rather than keep it at those numbers, and for not allowing the Biden administration to see those plans during that boxed transition you’ll recall in late 2020 when the Biden transition teams were trying to get information from agencies and the Trump administration was blocking them from doing so,” he continued.
“National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said they were going to do a ‘hot wash’, which is a fancy bureaucratic term for a deep dive into what went wrong. This 12 page document is a whitewash,” O’Keefe declared.
O’Keefe went on to further slam the shoddiness of the document.
“It is narrative. It is light on specifics. It’s devoid of citations. And it is, in essence, their version of events,” he said.
The Biden administration drew criticism from former Trump administration officials and the broader public upon the document’s release. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slammed the report Thursday.
“This was entirely predictable. We (the Trump administration) didn’t constrain them at all. The Biden administration has demonstrated their willingness to break up good plans that the Trump administration had,” Pompeo said.
Various Republican legislators also slammed the Biden administration’s report.
The war in Afghanistan spanned over two decades and four U.S. presidents. When it was first initiated by President Bush in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks, few Americans imagined it would lead to a decades-long attempt to establish democracy using military force. By the conclusion of the war, over 2,000 U.S. service members had been killed and the country fell to the Taliban, the Islamic group that controlled the country before America’s invasion.
