In the three years since an ISIS-K suicide bomber killed 13 American servicemembers during the Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous withdrawl from Afghanistan, the Department of State has yet to prioritize, or amend, the process by which Americans are evacuated from countries around the world, multiple senior Hill staff tell the Washington Reporter.
During the Biden administration’s withdrawal, tens of thousands of Americans and Afghan allies were stranded in Afghanistan, awaiting assistance from the State Department. The department has yet to remedy the issues — indifference, low staffing, and incompetence, sources told the Reporter — in its rescue operations processes.
“The U.S. government is not a travel agent, it is not a cruise director,” a top foreign policy staffer said. “It can’t be everything for everybody. But I can’t give them the benefit of the doubt when they looked at blue passport holders and said ‘sorry, I can’t help you.’ Millions of Americans who travel overseas believe that when they carry that American passport that it means that your country will help you when you are overseas. The Biden administration took a 100 year sacred compact, lit it on fire, and then turned the page on it.”
State has “seemingly not changed anything” in the three years since promising to evacuate Americans or allies in Afghanistan, one top Republican said, adding that “I don’t see anything that suggests a new process for how to handle Americans who are stuck somewhere.” In the years since President Joe Biden presided over the failed withdrawal from Afghanistan, American embassies in countries from Ukraine to Haiti to Sudan and beyond have been fully or partially evacuated.
Allied Afghans struggled to evacuate during the chaos in August 2021, according to communications reviewed by the Reporter. “I need fucking help!!! On god they just pointed the gun on me. Saying I’m not Muslim and I’m an American trying to go to America. Please I beg of you,” one ally wrote in a text message. “I was told they have my name and family’s name inside the airport .. but noopppe,” another wrote. “My son is sick and got trama. Everywhere is firing and we are in hell,” another said.
While Congress must propose specific reforms, the White House’s failures to rescue Americans from around the world are unsustainable, one policy expert said: “The Biden Administration continues to shutter embassies, sow chaos around the world, and tell American citizens it can’t — and won’t help them,” he told the Reporter.
Democrats who criticized the Biden administration’s withdrawal, and the ensuing chaos, behind closed doors were also willing to give the president a free pass. “Democrat staffers shared our frustration with the White House and State Department — and would even go further in their criticism when talking to us,” one person privy to Democratic discussions about the situation said. “But publicly, they never said a word, and I didn’t even need to ask if they would deny everything they said. So I didn’t.”
Both Democrat-controlled houses of Congress were closed to the public in the Capitol and in district offices across the country during the summer of 2021, over claims that the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated work from home until further notice. Congress’s remote work schedule made coordination difficult, which is why some lawmakers, like Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), demanded that Congress quit its recess when the Taliban took control of Kabul.
“When Americans and our allies are under attack, leaders shouldn’t stay on vacation, where the White House apparently remains,” Issa said on August 16, 2021. “I thus request [that] you call on Congress to immediately return to Washington for emergency oversight briefings by senior level executive branch officials…anything less is insufficient to conduct appropriate oversight and Congressional activity.”
Congress stayed remote and did not return for an emergency session. The State Department instead hosted calls that were widely condemned even by Democrats. At the time, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.) was chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and had a large staff that was active on behind-the-scenes calls as the Taliban took over.
“You’ve got to do something, this is fucked,” is how one person recalled Nadler’s staff berating officials from State, who would regularly excuse themselves from calls because of unspecified “hard outs” they had to get to. “They were angry that they couldn’t get any help for their constituents, but they weren’t going to say that publicly,” one participant told the Reporter.
Within the State Department, Darin Hoover, a Gold Star father, whose son Staff Sgt. Taylor Hoover was killed during the Abbey Gate suicide attack, told the Reporter that “Blinken is directly responsible for his actions and inactions taken during that time because he is the Secretary of State. He didn’t make arrangements to pull out the staff from the embassy, he didn’t have them train to be able to shut down the embassy.”
In the years since the withdrawal, Derek Chollet, a top Blinken advisor, was rewarded with a promotion to the Department of Defense as its chief of staff. Shortly after the announcement, Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas) blasted Chollet, who calls himself the Wolf based off of a character in Pulp Fiction, as being “absolutely unqualified” for his new role. In a December interview with the McCaul-led House Foreign Affairs Committee, Chollet failed to answer questions 100 times when asked about the Afghanistan withdrawal.
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan also“frankly didn’t do his job,” Hoover said. “They had either no intel or slow intel on how quickly the Taliban was moving through Afghanistan up to and until the Taliban got into Kabul, they had no idea what the hell was going on because of the failure in the intel community. Then you’ve got [John] Kirby screaming ‘I don’t see any chaos from my perch.’ Well, what the hell perch are you sitting on?”
“Everyone has failed up, DOD has circled the wagons, and there is an absolute culture of self-preservation,” Marlon Bateman, a liaison for the Abbey Gate Coalition, told the Reporter. “This is an institutional strategy within the ranks to cover for everybody.”
Some Congressional staffers, however, prioritized rescue operations. “I slept about an hour a night,” a then-district-based staffer for Issa told the Reporter. “During the night I was handling my assets and agents, basically managing people’s nerves who were scared to death because I was navigating them around Taliban checkpoints to different [Hamid Karzai International Airport] gates, coordinating them with [Joint Special Operations Command] rally points, etc.”
“I was also getting intel from people on the ground. During the day [in California] I was running ops. I would try and get an hour or so of sleep but I would get calls all through the night,” the staffer added. “The first month was about an hour of sleep a night while working from home. The second month was more chill because [the U.S. government] had all left, so it was more about planning rat lines into Islamabad or Tajikistan and trying to figure out ways to get people out other than land routes. So I got more sleep that second month.”
At times, the State Department jeopardized Americans who were fleeing. One American, Nasria, was ultimately rescued due to the efforts of Issa’s staff; prior to that, she followed directions from State, which led her directly into the hands of the Taliban, who assaulted her.
Nasria’s arrival to America only happened after during a remote testimony in September 2021, Issa confronted Secretary of State Antony Blinken with a memo the State Department sent telling those seeking to leave: “do not rely on U.S. government assistance.” Within an hour, Issa and his team got a call letting them know that Nasria was on a scheduled flight out of Afghanistan. Memos like the one Issa displayed have been standard State Department practice in the multiple embassy evacuations since August 2021, multiple Hill staff noted to the Reporter.
Many stranded Americans turned to their elected officials in Congress, only to have their pleas fall on deaf ears. In one case, dozens of Afghan-American school children were stranded.
David Miyashiro, the Superintendent of the Cajon Valley Union School District, attempted to contact Rep. Sara Jacobs (D., Calif.), his district’s member of Congress, only for his pleas to go unanswered, the Reporter was told. Miyashiro successfully connected with Issa, whose team helped dozens of school children evacuate safely.
The staff of another California Democrat, outgoing Rep. Katie Porter, at one point told a reporter that “we don’t do Afghanistan.” When asked for comment about this allegation, Porter’s office said that it “began casework for dozens of Orange County families, successfully helping at least four refugees find safety with their relatives in the United States.
“Four refugees was a light morning for us and other offices who really tried to help these people,” a staffer noted to the Reporter. “I know of two offices that picked up the slack for Porter. Even their made up excuse shows they didn’t do Afghanistan.”
It wasn’t just Porter’s office that didn’t “do Afghanistan.” Rep. Pete Aguilar (D., Calif.) who is now the number-three Democrat in the House, has been outright “disgraceful” toward Cheryl Rex, one of his constituents, whose son Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola was killed at Abbey Gate,” one person who worked rescue ops said.
Years after the Abbey Gate attack, Rex said that Aguilar has continually avoided her, despite pledging to meet in both Washington, D.C., and in California. Last year, he missed her while she was visiting that Capitol, and he told her that the “would meet with me in my own district, [and] after two months has not reached back out to me.”
The high-ranking Democrat was also “invited to attend the dedication ceremony on the renaming of the overcrossing to Lance Cpl. Dylan Merola in which he did not attend but sent an office staffer in his place who also did not introduce himself to me while we had [others] attend who did come up to meet me and some had plaques in honor of Dylan to present to me,” Rex said.
Other Democrats did outsource work to Republican offices like Issa’s. The staff of Rep. Ed Case (D., Hawaii) at one point informed Issa’s office that a bus full of nuns needed to be evacuated.
“I thought it was a joke. It wasn’t,” one of Issa’s former staffers said. “I took down as much information as I could but I could tell the staffers didn’t have much to go on — none of us did. Then I called the Pentagon, which at that time was relaying information to Marines and Soldiers on the ground.” At the time, the staffer thought “here we were, trying to play telephone halfway around the world, telling someone to look for a ‘bus for of nuns.’ You can’t make this stuff up.” And, he said, Case’s office “ghosted us — probably when they realized it went against Biden to ask a Republican to get their bus of nuns onto a plane.”
Following the high-profile rescues facilitated by Issa’s office, “what seemed like the entirety of Congress converged on [our] office asking ‘how did you get people out?’” a former Issa staffer told the Reporter. “That’s when I started to tally up the amount of offices and number of American citizens each office said they had, and we knew the White House was lying or completely incompetent about the number of Americans stuck in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over.”
Biden and Harris have never said the names of the 13 American servicemembers who were killed three years ago today out loud, and high-level administration officials, like then-Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby lied about the outlook in Afghanistan. Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki also lied in her recent book, falsely claiming that Biden did not repeatedly stare at his watch during the dignified transfer of the American servicemembers. Psaki edited her book, but issued no apology, following an outcry from the Gold Star families who were, unlike Psaki, on the tarmac.
Despite Biden’s efforts to turn the page on Afghanistan, the issue remains. Several of the Gold Star family members, whose loved ones were killed three years ago, spoke at last month’s Republican National Convention. Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) also announced plans to award their children with the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest award Congress can bestow.
On Monday, President Donald Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery with several of the Gold Star families for multiple wreath-laying ceremonies. Hoover told the Reporter that Trump joining him at Arlington is “an honor not only for our kids,” but it also shows that Trump “cares and is devoted to us as the families of the fallen. For him to take time out of his schedule to be there and to actually lay three wreaths in the names of Taylor and Nicole [Gee] and the rest of the 13 who were killed that day…speaks volumes to the type of man that President Trump is.”
Some Democrats in Congress have paid lip service to the families, but have yet to follow words with action. Rep. Jason Crow (D., Colo.), a former Army Ranger who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, ignored multiple of the Gold Star families’ requests to meet with him, a source familiar with the plans told the Reporter, despite him telling them on multiple occasions that he would get in touch with them.