Fired Up Kirby Rips Trump While Defending Afghanistan Evacuation: Biden ‘Didn’t Invite the Taliban to Camp David!’

NBC News White House Correspondent Kristen Welker pressed National Security Council spokesman John Kirby on Thursday regarding a newly released report on the lessons learned from the deadly U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which largely appeared to blame the Trump administration.

“It seems like page after page this places the blame on the previous administration, starting with page one. President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor,” Welker began.

“Yeah,” Kirby interjected, agreeing.

“Let me just follow up with you on something that Ed was asking, which is, does the president take responsibility for the withdrawal and everything that happened thereafter?” she then asked.

“He’s a commander in chief and he absolutely has responsibility for the operations that our men and women conduct and the orders that he gives. And he continues to believe that the order to withdraw from Afghanistan was the right one. And if you just look, Kristen, at what’s happened since we pulled out of Afghanistan and see what the United States military has been better able to do on behalf of the American people, I think there’s only one conclusion you can come to in that it was the right decision,” Kirby replied.

“And as you list things…” Welker began to follow up as Kirby cut her off to say, “But before, but you need to remember and I get the question about, you know, the previous administration. You got to look at when he came into office, what he was walking into.”

“He didn’t negotiate with the Taliban. He didn’t invite the Taliban to Camp David. He didn’t release 5000 prisoners. He didn’t reduce force levels in Afghanistan to 2500. And he didn’t have an arrangement with the Taliban that they wouldn’t attack our troops. He came in with a certain set of circumstances. He had no ability to change. He had to deal with it based on what he inherited,” a very animated Kirby added, defending President Biden.

“And yet, he had eight months to plan, did he not?” Welker pushed back.

“He had to take eight months to plan because whatever plans there might have been done by the previous administration, we didn’t see them,” Kirby shot back, adding:

And then it was not apparent that there was a lot of planning done. So, yes, he took some time to work through that. I don’t think he can be blamed for that. In fact, he enabled and was able to secure from the Taliban extra time on the clock because by May 1st, you might remember, they were going to come in, guns ablaze. Hang on a second. I’ll get to you.

They were going to come in guns blazing on May 1st. He got until the end of August so that we could do that. I mentioned that my opening statement, proper planning, proper planning, that that accounted for high-risk scenarios and improbabilities that we hadn’t thought of before so that he could get military forces pre-positioned in the region so that if we had to go in and conduct an evacuation, they could do that. And you know how fast they got there? 48 hours when we ordered a NEO, a noncombatant evacuation, because he put them there and he had to have time to do that. Right.

“Does the president believe, what mistakes does the president believe he made?” Welker then asked.

“I’m not going to speak for the president on that score. What I can tell you is that, again, we’ve done a good-faith effort here to work through the lessons learned of this withdrawal,” Kirby replied.

Welker ended the tense exchange asking, “John, just finally, given the enormity of this report, given the American lives that were lost, why are we not hearing directly from the president?”

“We are putting this forth for you and for Congress today. And I think you’ve heard from the president, he has talked many times about he has talked many times about his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, his belief that it was the right decision. He has talked publicly about the withdrawal before and about the courage and sacrifice and the professionalism. And he has been he and the first lady have been very open and honest and transparent about the sorry sorrow that they feel for for those that lost their lives,” Kirby replied, referencing the 13 U.S. service members killed during the evacuation.

Watch the full clip above via C-SPAN