DOGPILE! Reporters Hound Kirby on Biden’s Afghan Withdrawal Report
On Thursday’s White House press conference, the incompetent Karine Jean-Pierre once again used National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby as a crutch by letting him brief the members of the White House press corps for nearly the entire time. The topic of the day was the conveniently timed release of the Biden regime’s post-mortem on the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. The reporters in the room skewered Kirby on the report’s findings as well as the pre-holiday news dump. During what WMAL radio talk show host Vince Coglianese refers to as “the grownup press briefing,” Kirby struggled with the rare barbs from all sides.
First up was CBS’s Ed O’Keefe who was furious at what he called the “major holiday news dump.” “I think I speak on behalf of my colleagues in this room when we want the record to reflect that this was sent to us about 10 minutes before the briefing began with little notice,” O’Keefe fumed.
“So, why today? And is this all we get? And is this a response to the studies that were done by the agencies? Or is this considered a summary of them?” O’Keefe asked.
Kirby responded by claiming “This is the result of months and months of work by individual agencies who were participating in the withdrawal to voluntarily review that withdrawal, which they did.”
O’Keefe continued to drill down on Kirby. Click “expand” to read:
O’KEEFE: I got two specific ones about what’s in this document after a speed read here. On page eight: “The President received and accepted the unanimous advice of his top national security officials to end the evacuation on August 31st.” What is the definition of a “top national security official”? Because we know, for example, that General McKenzie, who was then head of CENTCOM, has said he objected to aspects of this. So what’s the definition of a top national security official?
KIRBY: I am loath to get into the individual advice that individual members of the President’s team give him. That would not be appropriate for me. But I can tell you, having lived through this as well at the Pentagon, that the President specifically asked his team: Should we extend past the 31st? He specifically asked them to go back and look and see what that would look like. Because we had secured this additional time from the Taliban to the 31st of August. And the team did that. The team did that, Ed, not just at the highest levels of the Pentagon, from the Secretary to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to General McKenzie, but even the operational commanders on the ground.
And there were numerous flag and general officers on the ground at the airport. All of them took a fair look at the President’s request and came back to him —
O’KEEFE: But are they all top national security officials?
KIRBY: — and said that it would not be advisable given the high-threat environment. Remember what also happened — on the 26th, that attack at Abbey Gate. And then we had very high temp between the 26th and the 30th, in which, of course, there was a kinetic strike taken in downtown Kabul. There was — there was high temp. And so, the advice of his senior national security team all the way up to the senior levels of the Pentagon advised him that the 31st was the appropriate date to end that evacuation.
O’KEEFE: There’s four pages here of blame on the previous administration or this White House explanation of what the last White House did regarding Afghanistan. Nowhere in here does there appear to be any expression of accountability or mistake by either the President himself or others? Is there any for what happened?
KIRBY: I would argue that the very fact that we voluntarily — the agencies voluntarily decided to go conduct after-action reviews — nobody told them to do that. That wasn’t legislated by Congress. They did that on their own. And the fact that they did that and that we’re now placing it in — in — on the Hill for Congress to look at; the fact that we digested and distilled some of the key points of that and gave it out in a public document; the fact that I’m up here talking to you about it, I think, shows you how seriously the President felt about learning lessons from this withdrawal.
I would also point out to you that the work isn’t over. So, number one, even before you got that document, some of those lessons were applied. I had talked about Ethiopia. I talked about Ukraine. And number two, it’s not like — it’s not like the work is all over. The President signed the legislation enabling the— the Afghan War Commission to be formed. And we’re going to continue to work and cooperate with that. That’s going to look at the whole 20 years. And America’s longest war deserves a lengthy review and lengthy study, and the President is committed to that. Thank you.
Later on, Real Clear Politics’ Phillip Wegmann noted that the “summer before the withdrawal, there was a dissent channel — cable that was written by 23 State Department officials there at the Kabul Embassy, warning that the administration, in their view, was not prepared at that moment for the withdrawal.”
He then politely asked, “Did this review take that dissent cable into account?”
Wegmann asked a follow-up on if “there was a moment during the Afghanistan withdrawal that the President lost confidence in the assessments that were given to him by the intelligence community.”
“The President knows how hard people work across the administration to try to give him the best information that they can,” Kirby responded with a non-answer answer.
“No one doubts that they weren’t working hard. But their assessment was flawed, and they failed in that assessment,” Wegmann shot back before asking “Has anyone been held accountable for giving the President a wrong view about how things were turning out on the ground?”
Next up was NBC’s Kristen Welker who surprisingly challenged Kirby. Her question was on whether Biden was willing to take any responsibility. “Does the President take responsibility for the withdrawal and everything that happened thereafter?”
After Kirby continued to make excuses for how badly things went in Afghanistan, Welker cut him off and asked “He had eight months to plan. Did he not?”
Kirby’s reply was to blame Trump again by claiming Biden “had to take eight months to plan because we — whatever plans there might have been done by the previous administration, we didn’t see.”
Asking once again for some form of transparency, Welker inquired that “Given the enormity of this report, given the American lives that were lost, why are we not hearing directly from the President?”
“We are putting this forth for you and for Congress to- — today. And I think you’ve heard from the President. He has talked many times,” Kirby replied before Welker interjected: “But not about this report.”
Then came the moment everyone waits for at every press conference: Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy:
“The purpose of the document that we’re putting out today is to sort of collate the chief reviews and findings of the agencies that did after-action reviews,” Kirby responded in bureaucratic gibberish.
“Do you admit that the intel was bad? So how can President Biden ever trust, when they come into the Oval Office with the PDB, that anything in there is legit?” Doocy shot back.
“What I said was intelligence is hard business, and they get it right a lot too. There were some pieces here that weren’t accurate,” Kirby replied.
Then things got heated between Doocy and Kirby. Click “expand” to read the full exchange:
DOOCY: But it doesn’t seem like after the country has had a couple months to review this, and as the government has, people don’t have an issue with the decision to order troops out of Afghanistan. It is with the way that this President ordered it done. There were children being killed. There were people hanging off of Air Force jets that were leaving. And you’re saying that you guys are proud of the way that this mission was conducted?
KIRBY: It doesn’t mean —
DOOCY: You’re proud of that?
KIRBY: Proud of the fact that we got more than 124,000 people safely out of Afghanistan? You bet. Proud of the fact that American troops were able to seize control of a defunct airport and get it operational in 48 hours? You bet. Proud of the fact that we now have about 100,000 Afghans, our former allies and partners, living in this country and working towards citizenship? You bet. But does that mean that everything went perfect in that evacuation? Of course not.
I’ve talked about it from a dif- — a different podium. The after-action reviews are now being reviewed by members of Congress, which will lay out things that could have gone better. Nobody is saying that everything was perfect, but there was a lot that went right. And…
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