On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Katy Tur Reports,” NBC News Investigative Unit Reporter Dan De Luce and guest host Alex Witt reacted to the Biden administration’s report on the withdrawal from Afghanistan by stating that the report omits “that, as early as April of that year, there were lawmakers and refugee advocates and veterans groups that were all pleading with the White House privately and publicly to start evacuating all of the Afghans that had worked as interpreters and in other jobs for U.S. forces.” And that the administration had seven months after it took power to plan and make policies for the withdrawal.
De Luce said, “There are not really new facts as far as we can see in this report. It’s very much an argument, similar to the argument they made right after that chaotic withdrawal that, really, they inherited this terrible situation from the Trump administration, that the intelligence community wasn’t predicting the Afghan Army would collapse so quickly, and that they did the best they could in those circumstances. But it’s very defensive in tone. And it doesn’t mention that, as early as April of that year, there were lawmakers and refugee advocates and veterans groups that were all pleading with the White House privately and publicly to start evacuating all of the Afghans that had worked as interpreters and in other jobs for U.S. forces. So, I think this is not going to resolve the criticism and the debate about how the withdrawal was managed, setting aside whether the decision to withdraw was the right one.”
Witt stated, “[T]he fact is, the Biden administration had seven months after taking over from the Trump administration before that withdrawal. I’m sure that classified report will have a lot more details, and maybe we’ll get some of that down the road. ”
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