BUCK: Special treat today for all of you: Our friend Raheem Kassam. He’s the editor-in-chief of The National Pulse, cohost of the War Room podcast with Steve Bannon, and he’s got an exclusive piece up at the National Post: “Joe Biden State Department halted a Trump-era crisis response plan aimed at avoiding Benghazi-style evacuations just months before the Taliban takeover.” Raheem, welcome.
RAHEEM: Well, thank you for having me, Buck?
BUCK: What is this story all about, man? I read the headline; I read the piece, I said, “Wow.”
RAHEEM: Yeah, you know, it’s really interesting. I worked in the field of sort of counterextremism, counterterrorism. I have obviously written books about radical Islam and studied a lot of this for so long. And with all of the noise over the last week, Buck, about Afghanistan and everything that’s been taking place, I just couldn’t understand these people who told us that they were the adults coming back into the rooms — who told us that they were respected on the world stage, told us that they had the plans and that it was Donald Trump that was the liability.
I couldn’t understand, you know, where things technically or policy-wise went wrong. And then somebody actually from — or I probably shouldn’t say where they’re from me from, but somebody sent me an internal memo from — within the State Department. And it all started to make sense. And what that memo effectively said was that in June of this year the Biden State Department canceled a new bureau that Mike Pompeo and Donald Trump wanted to found.
They actually created the idea for this back in October, the money was moved to create this bureau in January, and that bureau’s job was to be the extraction and the exfiltration element for crisis zones around the world like Kabul, for instance. And it was within days, I’m told, from my sources in the State Department — days — of Biden being inaugurated that they started to dismantle this bureau. CCR, Crisis and Contingency Response.
Now, the State Department has had this capability for some time, but it’s tied up with all different other elements, specifically medical elements, and those elements were used at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic to get Americans home. But what happened in this scenario is it appears that the Biden State Department… I don’t know whether it was Antony Blinken himself or somebody else in there.
I’m actually told that it was a lot of career bureaucrats in the State Department that wanted to nix this plan simply because it was a Trump-era plan. What it appears to have done was led to a lack of capability on the United States’ part to actually get Americans out of Afghanistan in this scenario. And I think, Buck, if I may.
I think it’s stunning, I think it’s heinous, and I think it goes right to the heart of that question that I had right at the beginning of all of this, as these scenes began to unfold over our television screens over the last week is how do you have a situation where there are still over 10,000 Americans in Afghanistan, and they are unable to be evacuated? This answers that question.
CLAY: Raheem, really good work. This is Clay. I appreciate you coming on with us and discussing the piece that you did. Now, bigger picture here: We hope that we’re going to get those 10,000-plus American citizens out safely. Ultimately, though, what are describing is a systemic failure of the Biden administration. Who ends up bearing the blame here when all is said and done for this calamity?
RAHEEM: Well, I think we have to take the man at his word. He said the buck stops with him. He went on national television and said as much. And I think we have to take him at his word for that. Let me put it this way. (chuckles) A different president was impeached for far less than this. This goes to the heart of the safety of Americans around the world.
Realistically, as you both well know, it goes to the heart of America to project power on the global stage. Currently I hate to break it to you as if anybody didn’t know this already, but America is being ridiculed on the world stage as a result of what’s taken place in the last couple of weeks.
The front page of The Sun newspaper, one of the largest distribution newspapers in the United Kingdom’s headline of the, “Joke Biden.” You know, we don’t tend to do that about American presidents. We certainly don’t tend to that about our greatest ally in the world. but that is how far the situation has gone.
Now, I happen to believe that without rooting out who in the State Department — specifically at a career level, not a political level — tried to get this program nixed, I don’t think that there can be any true accountability. But at a political level, Joe Biden has said he wants to own this, and I think certainly Republicans on Capitol Hill should make him own this specific issue.
BUCK: We’re speaking to Raheem Kassam, editor-in-chief of The National Pulse. Go to TheNationalPulse.com for their exclusive story about Biden State Department getting rid of a bureau that would have tried to avoid the calamity that we are seeing unfold right now in Afghanistan when it comes to evacuation of personnel. Also, Raheem is on the War Room podcast daily with Steve Bannon and Jason Miller.
Raheem, you have a background in extremism, analysis, and counterterrorism. I come from the CTC/CIA background. People are asking a lot of questions about this Taliban, although I guess we could say even though it’s even beyond that. Do you believe that there’s gonna be any real difference in the way this Taliban approaches its mandate, so to speak, as this terrorist regime? Do you think it’s going to be a different Taliban this time around?
RAHEEM: (laughing) No. (laughing) And I will… I mean, the question isn’t risible but the premise is risible, right? This is the premise we’ve been led to believe by the repeat Americans of deputy Pentagon press secretaries who can’t, by the way, put a number on how many Americans are ’til left in Afghanistan.
But they’re more than ready to wax lyrical about the new ideology of this nouveau Taliban, right? This postmodern Taliban that is gonna respect everybody’s rights and, you know, what did CNN say about them, that they were chanting “Death to America!” but in a real friendly way!
CLAY: (laughing) yes.
RAHEEM: It’s naivete writ large. It’s dangerous that, you know, let me bring it back to the original story. Had the original deadline in May been stuck to and had the CCR bureau — this Crisis Contingency Response Bureau — been allowed to do the job that it was tasked to do, I happen to know who was involved with this and what kind of operations that they were planning to run.
These are competent people who have been doing this for years upon years upon years, especially as readers will learn in the OpMed bureau in the State Department — very quiet bureau but very effective bureau — and had all of that happened as it was supposed to happen, as Donald Trump had planned for it to happen, you wouldn’t have had this chaotic situation.
And it comes back to what Biden said the other day. He said, “I don’t know any given situation where we could have left where there wouldn’t have been chaos.” Well, Mr. President, there was one right in front of you, and you and your State Department nixed it simply because it was a Trump-era plan.
CLAY: Raheem, given what you have reported and what you have seen, should Republicans impeach Joe Biden?
RAHEEM: Yes. I mean, there can be no two ways about it. It would be one thing if you were leaving a country and you were leaving it in a terrible state and the Taliban were taking over and, you know, the MSNBC anchors could wring their hands about women’s rights, so on and so forth.
But this goes further than that, even. This goes to the heart of how foreign policy works, who calls the shots, and if Americans are safe abroad. If Americans are not safe abroad, and if the Chinese Communist Party and Islamic terror groups around the world see that Americans are not safe abroad, well, then, guys, what do you think is gonna start happening?
We’re going to see people taken hostage. We’re going to see American installations attacked. We’re going to see more situations like this because they now look at “Joke Biden,” as The Sun called him, as that joke, and who it knows his ability to do anything. A story came out of the United Kingdom today that Boris Johnson, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, one of America’s most important allies in the war against terror, could not get Joe Biden on the phone.
For over a day and a half, could not get the president of the United States on the phone to discuss exfiltration strategies, extraction of their citizens. And so everybody just went off and did it themselves. (chuckles) I don’t know about you guys, but I was told that those sorts of irresponsible things were the types of things that Donald Trump would do, and he never did. And now look at the situation.
BUCK: Yeah. It turns out they’ve made it worse. “Leading from behind under Obama” has turned into “not leading at all from the basement” under Biden. So this is what we’re up against. Raheem Kassam, everybody. read TheNationalPulse.com for their exclusive reporting Raheem on this. Raheem, great to have you.
RAHEEM: Thank you. Thanks for having me, guys.
BUCK: Come back in in a. Minute we’ve got some veterans on the lines, Clay. We’ll get to that. Plus we’ve got a senator joining us.
CLAY: Yeah, Senator Bill Hagerty from Tennessee, and that was interesting from Raheem there, saying that he believes Joe Biden should be impeached. Obviously, there’s complications we don’t control the House with how exactly that might take place. But what does Hagerty think inside of the Senate about this? We’ll ask him that question specifically.
BUCK: Yeah. If doing a really bad job is enough to get you impeached in a way that —
CLAY: If a phone call is, you would think this might be.
BUCK: Yeah, he said another president gets impeached. Trump got impeached twice for absurdities — nonimpeachable offenses and non-offenses, actually.