Biden Pentagon spokesman insisted Afghan withdrawal wasn't chaotic but his emails say otherwise

Defense Department internal memos made public three years after crisis undermine the official narrative of the Afghanistan withdrawal, showing the Pentagon was acutely aware of a chaotic and deteriorating situation.

By Steven Richards and John Solomon Updated: August 25, 2024 11:45pm1/3

The Pentagon's chief spokesman has long insisted there was no "chaos" during the bungled U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, buthis own email correspondence shows senior officials were acutely aware that conditions in the country were chaotic and spiraling into deadly violence, according to newly obtained government documents.

These memos and emails chronicle political efforts by the Biden/Harris administration to soft-pedal the truth to the American people about its first major foreign crisis. The documents were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request from the nonprofit watchdog Functional Government Initiative.

The memos show, for instance, that while then-DOD Undersecretary of Communications John Kirby tried to jaw-bone reporters to portray the Afghan withdrawal as orderly like President Joe Biden had promised, he was receiving briefings from diplomats and military officials in theater who were frantic to stabilize a crisis, particularly at the Kabul airport were evacuations of Americans were taking place.

One State Department situation report emailed to Kirby on Aug. 16, 2021 10 days before a suicide bomber killed 13 U.S. Marines referred to "breaches" and "flightline insecurity" at the airport that resulted in the exchange of gunfire that killed five Afghans and may have wounded an American soldier. "The crowd was out of control, the firing was only done to defuse the chaos," the email reported, citing an official U.S. statement released inside the country.

"Hundreds have flooded the flight line and in at least one case, have forced themselves onto at least one US mil (and other civilian) aircraft. Crowds continue to run alongside planes, including mil aircraft," the report added. Several Afghans clinging to U.S. aircraft fell to their deaths.

Another email that same day from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's speechwriter urged Kirby to consider having the Pentagon chief use a public event with a foreign counterpart to provide a "serious topper on the Afghan chaos."

A day after the Marines were killed by the suicide bomber, Kirby received an email from an Army Major trying to rescue his former Afghan-born interpreter.

The email described a grisly crackdown by the Taliban, reporting they were "killing former interpreters" and those trying to escape were frustrated by disorganized U.S. efforts to evacuate them. "It seems up to the discretion of the Taliban and US service members on the line in the midst of the chaos," the major wrote Kirby on Aug. 27, 2021.

In all, the internal Pentagon emails to Kirby used the words "chaos" or "chaotic" more than two dozen times and stand in stark contrast to the contemporaneous efforts by Kirby and then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki to downplay concerns that the administration had mishandled the withdrawal.

“Now, some say we should have started mass evacuations soonerand, ‘Couldn’t this have been done in a more orderly manner?’”Kirby saidfollowing the pullout.“I respectfully disagree.”

“The bottom line,” he added, “is there is no evacuation from the end of a war that you can run without the kinds of complexities, challenges, threats we faced. None.”

Almost two years after the withdrawal, Kirby defended the administration’s record in the face of new after-action reports about the operation.

“The president is very proud about the manner in which the men and women of the military, the foreign service, the intelligence community and on and on and on conducted this withdrawal,” Kirby said at an April 2023 press conference, almost two years after the withdrawal. “I’ve been around operations my entire life and there’s not a single one that ever goes perfectly according to plan.”

https://justthenews.com/government/security/defense-department-internal-memos-undermine-official-narrative-afghanistan

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“For all this talk of chaos, I just didn’t see it. Not from my perch,” Kirby added. Kirby, now the National Security Communications Advisor for President Biden, did not respond to a request for comment from Just the News.

The group that obtained Kirby's emails said the documents expose a troubling gap between the Biden/Harris administration's public pronouncements three years ago and the reality that was being reported to it on the ground.

“These documents are Mr. Kirby’s perch. They show what he saw–confusion, miscommunication, inadequate resources, tragic deaths. This situation showed an administration out of its depth and a military trying to salvage a near-impossible situation. But the American public didn’t need these emails to know the truth about the chaos. They saw the shameful episode unfold in real time on their TV screens,” said Peter McGinnis, a spokesperson for the Functional Government Initiative.

The emails show that as theadministration dealt dishonestly with the public fallout of the withdrawal, Kirby was at the same time receiving messagesfrom senior officials and staffhighlighting the chaotic nature of the military action and the deteriorating situation.

In one example, a senior department speechwriter asked Kirbyfor advice on whether Secretary Lloyd Austinshould deliver “warm words”in public at a bilateral meeting with the Qatari Ministry of Defense and acknowledged the chaotic situation unfolding on the ground.

“Unless you're itching to get him to the podium, this could well be the first time the SD has been out in public since the collapse in Afghanistan,” speechwriter Warren Bass wrote in the Aug. 16, 2021 email. “At a minimum, he'd need to start with a serious topper on the Afghan chaos.”“Warren—warm words are good. We’ll want to do a spray given the circumstances,”Kirby replied.

The same day, Kirby forwarded a email with acomprehensive assessmentfrom the State Department aboutsummarizing the withdrawal developments, including security breaches at the Hamid Karzai International Airport, individuals forcing themselves onto aircraft, and gunfire exchanges as the military attempted to evacuate U.S. citizens and Afghan allies.“Good summary from State,”Kirby wrote, referencing the email below.

In another email,Kirby flagged the deteriorating security situation at the airportfor senior Defense Department advisors.

“I’m sure you all are tracking. But see below.Things are not going well at HKIA,” he wrote. The attached email was a report from a captain whose name is redacted sharing that Marines had killed two armed individuals in the crowd who were “threatening their post” and details about the deaths of several civilians who attempted to cling to a C-17 trying to take off from the airport.

"It’s going to be a rough day. We are continuing to flow people in an are planning on pushing the perimeter to the south,” the captain concluded.

You can read the full FOIA production below:

https://justthenews.com/government/security/defense-department-internal-memos-undermine-official-narrative-afghanistan

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File

FGI-FOIA-Kirby-Docs.pdf==link to PDF, 194 pages: https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2024-08/FGI-FOIA-Kirby-Docs.pdf

Just weeks after some of Kirby’s internal emails, an attack by the ISIS-K terrorist group on the perimeter of HamidKarzai airport killed 13 U.S. service members and injured more than 50 others. Over a dozen Afghan civilians, gathered in a large crowd around the airport’s Abbey Gate and attempting to flee the Taliban,were also killed. The deadly attack came just days before the final American aircraft left the embattled nation.

The Gold Star families of the soldiers killed in that attack have previously slammed President Biden for refusing to say their names out loud.

Biden would later gloss over the incident, claiming at the July presidential debate with former rival Donald Trumpthat no solider has died abroad on his watch. “The truth is, I'm the only president this century that doesn't have any this decade, any troops dying anywhere in the world like he did,” he said.

Then-White House Press Secretary JenPsaki also sought to publicly downplay the chaotic pullout and stick to the official narrativebeing peddled by the White House.

She testified in a closed-door hearing this summer that she did not "challenge the quality or veracity” of the information she was told to share with the American public (LIAR),adding evidence to the claim that the Biden Administration was downplaying the disastrous withdrawal, the Washington Free Beacon reported Friday.

Christopher Miller, former Acting Secretary of Defensein the final months of the Trump Administration,said that deceit by senior officials is troubling, most importantly because sends a bad messageto the younger generation who will become military leaders.

“So when, when, when you have the… spokesman or thespokesperson being deceitful, what message does that send to the young leaders that are in the military that had 30-40, soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, space guardians, Coast Guard people, whatever the case may be, under them, and those people are seeing their spokesperson being deceitful, what kind of message that send to the force?” Miller told the "John Solomon Reports" podcast.

“Because we always talk about, you know…it’s like lead by example, and to see the senior spokesperson, who, let's be clear… speaking on behalf of the Secretary of Defense, the senior civilian leader of the military in the United States,I find that atrocious, troubling, and concerns me beyond anything I could ever say on your show or elsewhere, but you understand what I'm saying, the American people do, that's not the tenets that we imbue into…those that volunteer to serve our country,” Miller added.

https://justthenews.com/government/security/defense-department-internal-memos-undermine-official-narrative-afghanistan

>21485877 Dan Scavino Jr.🇺🇸🦅 @DanScavino President Donald Trump Flowers for the lost.PN

Video attached

https://twitter.com/DanScavino/status/1828132534171115939

>>21485920 @realDonaldTrump⁩ speaks via phone to the family of SSG Ryan Knauss who couldn’t make it today, as he lays flowers at their boys grave.PN

Video attached

https://twitter.com/LaCivitaC/status/1828069598752567554

>>21485877

New Twitter Files raise question of how independent pre-Musk company was from Biden administration

House Weaponization Subcommittee's top Democrat claimed "real evidence showed" no coordination between Twitter and the feds, which is "just laughable" in light of internal emails, Twitter Files journalist Paul Thacker says.

By Greg Piper Published: August 25, 2024 10:57pm1/2

Where did the Biden administration end and Twitter begin?

The latest batch of the Twitter Files, reported by former Senate Finance Committee investigator Paul Thacker fromrecords turned over by the Elon Musk-owned company now called X, shows a curious timeline in the first couple months of Democratic President Joe Biden's term.

Within two weeks of the inauguration, the company covertly hired a "global strategic advisory and commercial diplomacy services" firm cofounded and chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albrightto seek State's help dealing with censorship pressure from India.

On the two-month anniversary of the Biden administration, Politico reported on a new "blob" that had formed from alumni from the firm, Albright Stonebridge. At least 10 had taken top foreign-policy jobs including United Nations ambassador, deputy secretary of state, two undersecretaries of state, and deputy national assistant security adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris.

Another became chief of staff to the now-Democratic nominee for president's husband, first gentleman Doug Emhoff.

The new tranche of internal emails"calls into sharp question claims by Democrats," including House Weaponization of the Federal Government Subcommittee ranking member Delegate Stacey Plaskett,"and their allies in the media that Twitter did not collude with federal agencies and was free from Biden administration pressure to make its own censorship decisions," Thacker wrote.

"India censoring of social media drove Twitter right into the arms of [a] lobby shop of foreign policy experts staffing the Biden administration,"he said. "How can a company [be] reliant on government advice and help make decisions independent of that same government?"

Plaskett represents the Virgin Islands and touts her bipartisan bona fidesby noting she started as a George W. Bush administration Justice Department lawyer, butgave the GOP fodder by demanding Twitter Files journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger turn over their sources, as the Federal Trade Commission had demanded of Musk after he opened the files.

At a hearing on the Twitter Files last year,Plaskett claimed that "real evidence showed that there wasn’t coordination between Twitter and the federal government," referring to a previous hearing with former Twitter executives.

"That’s just laughable"now, Thacker wrote."Twitter was highly relianton the advice and help of theBiden administration and their allied lobbyists to manage problems in India, Twitter’s third largest market."

Plaskett's office didn't respond to a query about how she perceives pre-Musk Twitter's relationship with the Biden administration in light of the new evidence. Before her passing in 2022,Albright was also a board member on the Atlantic Council, whose Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRL) partnered with State's Global Engagement Center on the "U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge against disinformation and propaganda" in fall 2021==.

GEC funded the Atlantic Council, which in June 2021 sent Twitter a spreadsheet of tens of thousands of accounts for removal, for purportedly "engaging in inauthentic behavior" supporting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling party "and Hindu nationalism more broadly" – regarded as India's version of Donald Trump's MAGA by American liberals.

Twitter's then-trust and safety chiefYoel Roth, who admitted using disappearing-message apps in communications with federal officials and complained about censorship pressure from the FBI, had mocked the accuracy of the DFRL list and a GEC Chinese list.

https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/new-twitter-files-raise-question-how-independent-pre-musk-company-was

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Yet "executives began collaborating with the State Department to address censorship in India, even as the State Department and their grantee the Atlantic Council pressured Twitter to censor," Thacker wrote.

DFRL was additionally one of four principals on the Department of Homeland Security-conceived Election Integrity Partnershipthat mass-reported purported election misinformation to social media platforms for suppression starting with the 2020 cycle.

Just the News reporting brought heavy scrutiny on the public-private collaboration, which this May said it had actually shuttered after the 2022 election, and Benz wrote a report on it too.

The Supreme Court's skepticism this spring that federal pressure to censor was unconstitutional apparently prompted the feds to start communicating with social media again about election misinformation, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., told reporters a couple weeks before the partnership's belated disclosure of its shuttering.

"The Atlantic Council has 7 CIA directors on its board, is funded by the Pentagon, the State Dept & cut-outs like the National Endowment for Democracy," former Trump administration State Department official Mike Benz recently noted on X.

The group gave international pop star Dua Lipa its "Distinguished Artistic Leadership Award" in 2021"for using her activist voice & reach to promote NATO’s political objectives in the Balkans," Benz said. Her sensual performances show "how effective this … NATO soft power technique… can be [sic]."

The new Twitter Files tranche is particularly relevantbecause Musk's critics have portrayed him as a hypocrite for "bending to foreign governments’ call to censor their own citizens" while claiming the Biden administration was censoring Americans, Thacker said.

Unlike Musk's recent decision to shut down X in Brazil to protect his legal representative from imprisonment for refusing to suspend accounts, he previously gave in to India's demands to censor Modi's critics on X when the government also threatened to jail its local executives.

Nearly four months before pre-Musk Twitter publicly pushed back on India's demands to censor accounts critical of its COVID-19response early in spring 2021, its newlobbyists at Albright Stonebridgeasked Deputy Assistant Secretary forSouth Asia Laura Stonefor help.

Senior Vice President John Hughes asked whether Stone could join a breakfast club with Global Head of Public Policy Monique Meche to "avoid any further escalation" with India, possibly through the U.S. Embassy's intervention.

A May 24, 2021, email from Meche asked Stone to "meet with us again for an update"on India's actions against Twitter. Days after the platform marked a tweet by the national spokesperson for Modi's party "manipulated media," police told Twitter's head in the country to be available for an investigation, then visited its Delhi office.

This followed "emergency blocking orders" for removal of more than 100 tweets criticizing the government's COVID response, Meche told Stone, who responded that State was trying to reach the embassy for more details and asked whether Meche wanted to talk that day or the next.

Twitter already talked to the embassy, Meche said. A flurry of emails between Twitter and State staff followed over the next 40 minutes, and Vinod Kannuthurai in State's Office of India Affairs toldTwitter's Heather Lenar to send State officials a calendar invitefor a half-hour from then.

Stone and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Kara McDonald would be on the call, Kannuthurai said. Thacker noted the email thread is marked “sensitive but unclassified.”

President Biden laternominated Stone as ambassador to the Marshall IslandsandMcDonald as ambassador to Lithuania, and both were confirmed.

https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/new-twitter-files-raise-question-how-independent-pre-musk-company-was

Jack Smith asks appeals court to reinstate Trump classified docs case

It is not clear how long it will take for the appeals court to make its decision, but even if it does reauthorize the case, the trial would not place before the November general election.

By Misty Severi Published: August 26, 2024 4:10pm

Special counsel Jack Smith on Monday asked a federal appeals court to reinstate former President Donald Trump's classified documents case, after it was dismissed last month.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the case in July, claiming Smith's appointment violated the Appointments clause of the Constitution, and that Smith had no authority to prosecute the case.

The appeal was filed in the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whereprosecutors claimed the ruling was “at oddswith widespread and longstanding appointment practices in the Department of Justice and across the government," according to the Associated Press.

It is not clear how long it will take for the appeals court to make its decision, but even if it does reauthorize the case, the trial would not place before the November general election.

The case includes allegations that Trump mishandled classified documents at the end of his presidency, which he kept at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. He was charged with dozens of felony charges related to the documents, including charges that he obstructed law enforcement and that he illegally retained the documents.

Trump pleaded not guilty.

If the appeals court declines to reinstate the case, it could still go to the Supreme Court.

(Jack Smith is missing all the attentionHe’s little evil brat, along with Garland. Trying to divert of the mess going on with Joe Bidan and Kamabla Harris.)

https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/jack-smith-asks-appeals-court-reinstate-trump-classified-docs-case

Texas AG raids homes of Latino civil rights group members, setting up a voting rights showdown

The raids have triggered outrage and cries of voter suppression in a state with a long history of discrimination against citizens of Mexican descent, which helped give rise to LULAC.

Aug. 26, 2024, 1:40 PM EDT By Suzanne Gamboa and Jane C. Timm

SAN ANTONIO — Raids on the homes of several Democrats in South Texas, in what the state attorney general said is an ongoing election integrity investigation, has set off a showdown with the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights group.

The Aug. 20 raids targeted Manuel Medina, chair of the Tejano Democrats, several members of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a state House candidate and a local area mayor.

The raids have triggered outrage and accusations of voter suppression in a state with a long history of discrimination against its citizens of Mexican descent, which gave rise to LULAC in 1929.

On Monday morning, LULAC leaders, state legislators, activists of other Latino groups and supporters and some of the people whose homes were raided protested outside the San Antonio office of Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican.

“This is point blank voter intimidation, and LULAC will fight for the right of every Latino to exercise the right to vote,” said Roman Palomares, LULAC's national president.

A copy of a wide-ranging search warrant left with one of the people targeted, LULAC volunteer Lidia Martinez, 87, of San Antonio,offered a window into the investigation’s interests. The warrant ordered the seizure of all electronic devices at her home, allowed for the opening of documents that were business-, organization- or election-related, and authorized swabbing for DNA.

According to the warrant, the purpose of the search was to look for evidence of violations of the Texas election laws regarding vote harvesting and identity fraud.

Medina’s home was also “forcibly entered” in the early morning of Aug. 20. According to a filing from his attorney, officers woke up Medina, his wife and two young daughters, and “rummaged through the residence” for seven hours, the attorney said, searching through the living spaces, closets, kitchen, bathrooms, garage and the family’s bedrooms.Officers seized 65 cellphones and 41 computers and storage devices, the filing said.

Two Democratic consultants who weren’t knowledgeable about Medina’s business or the investigation said someone running an election phone banking or canvassing operation can have multiple phones and computers for volunteers and staff.Medina's attorney was granted his request for an injunction to block the attorney general or any other state officials from reviewing the documents or disseminating them. A hearing on the search and seizures was set for Sept. 12.

In his filing requesting the injunction, Medina's attorney said authorities seized almost 65 cell phones and 41 computers, digital and other storage devices, papers, documents and family and other photographs.The attorney and Medina declined comment when reached Friday by NBC News.

“There is no poll tax. There is no white-only primary. There is no going back. We will not go back,” Domingo Garcia, LULAC’s former president, said during Monday’s protest. Garcia now heads a recently formed LULAC political action committee that endorsed Kamala Harris.

Paxton, who announced the raids Thursday in a news release, has been outspoken in advancing baseless claims about voter fraud — particularly about noncitizens voting in the upcoming election.

“There’s a reason Joe Biden brought people here illegally,” Paxton said on a radio show earlier this month. “I’m convinced that that’s how they’re going to do it this time, they’re going to use the illegal vote. Why were they brought in, why did he bring in 14 million people? He brought them here to vote.”

Paxton falsely claimed that immigrants were being given Social Security numbers at the border as part of the scheme, too. There’s no evidence of that, or that noncitizens cast ballots in any significant numbers. In the release announcing the raids, Paxton said his office would have no further comments on the investigation. NBC News reached out Friday and has not received a response.

But the release did state that the raids were the result of a two-year investigation based on allegations of voting and election violations from Audrey Gossett Louis, a district attorney for five area counties.

Latino leaders have called on the Department of Justice to investigate and are alleging the raids are a political move to suppress Latino votes. A Justice Department spokesperson said they are aware of the matter but declined to comment….

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/house-raids-texas-democrats-ken-paxton-voting-rights-lulac-rcna168216