Warner: Biden ‘Maybe Didn’t Hold Enough People Accountable’ for Afghanistan

On Wednesday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “On Balance,” Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) stated that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was “awful” and then-President Joe Biden “maybe didn’t hold enough people accountable” and the issue with the Trump administration’s Signal chat “is a pattern.”

Host Leland Vittert said, “I think, though, back to the withdrawal from Afghanistan, okay. 13 American servicemembers died. It was a colossal screw-up, okay. I didn’t hear Democrats talking about the demand for Jake Sullivan, the National Security Adviser, to resign or the secretary of defense or the secretary of state.”

Warner responded, “[G]o back and look at what I and others said about the screw-up. And I’d also kind of — it’s kind of ironic that the FBI head of, I believe it was counterterrorism, who helped us arrest the Abbey Gate bomber where the 13 soldiers died and 150 civilians, that was one of the guys they kicked out of office in the first week of this administration. And I guess, Leland, what I would say is, if this was a one-off, oops, screw up, but this is a pattern. Two weeks into this administration, there were 200 CIA agents whose identities got revealed. … There’s — virtually a day doesn’t go by, and a lot of this doesn’t get fully reported because we don’t want it out, where these DOGE guys maliciously or ignorantly release classified information. A classic point, they put up a list of federal properties that could be for sale. One of those was a classified site.”

Warner added that “if this was a normal military officer or a CIA agent, if they did this stuff, they’d be fired. All I’m saying is, for all the critiques of what Biden didn’t do, maybe didn’t hold enough people accountable, I’m asking this team, who made a lot of hay out of…what was an awful withdrawal from Afghanistan, are they going to be held to that standard or the standard?”

Vittert then cut in to say that he mentioned Hillary Clinton’s emails the day the Signal story came out and is making Warner’s point for him.

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett