CLAY: The lies are raining down in every direction. I got to tell you guys, every time I think the lies can’t become more insanely easy to point out as being lies from the Democratic Party, from Joe Biden, from everybody in his orbit, they just keep raining down. Yesterday, after we went off the air, Joe Biden finally waddled his way up to rostrum. He did not take questions, by the way, because — let’s be honest — Joe Biden can barely read off the teleprompter.
And he attempted to claim an extraordinary success for the way that Afghanistan has been handled. I mean, this is one of the biggest lies that has ever been shared by an American president. This is what Joe Biden said, yesterday. Play cut number one.
BIDEN: No nation — no nation — has ever done anything like it in all of history. Only the United States had the capacity and the will and the ability to do it, and we did it today. The extraordinary success of this mission was due to the incredible skill, bravely (sic) and selfless courage of the United States military and our diplomats and intelligence professionals. For weeks, they risked their lives to get American citizens, Afghans who helped us, citizens of our allies and partners and others on board planes and out of the country. And they did it facing a crush of enormous crowds seeking to leave the country.
CLAY: Okay. That’s one big lie. The second big lie, I’m gonna play the cut that proves the lie as well. Biden claimed that we would get everybody out of Afghanistan, all of our American citizens. Well, in yesterday’s address, he turned that on its head and tried to take credit for getting 90% of our people out. Listen to this.
BIDEN: Bottom line: 90% of Americans in Afghanistan who wanted to leave were able to leave — and for those remaining Americans, there is no deadline.
CLAY: All right. Now, 90% — 90% can be good, if you got a kid on a spelling test. It’s not really that good when you’re leaving 10% of American citizens behind to face terrorists. And it’s a direct refutation of the promise, that Joe Biden made to George Stephanopoulos two weeks ago in an ABC interview. I want you to listen to this. He said, “We’re going to stay until all Americans are out.” This was just two weeks ago. Now, he’s caught in a lie, bragging about 90%.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Are you committed to making sure that the troops stay until every American —
BIDEN: Yeees!
STEPHANOPOULOS: — who wants to be out is out?
BIDEN: Yes.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So, Americans should understand that troops might have to be there beyond August 31st.
BIDEN: No! Americans should understand that we’re going to try to get it done before August 31st.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But, if we don’t, the troops will stay.
BIDEN: If we don’t, we’ll determine at the time who’s left.
STEPHANOPOULOS: And?
BIDEN: And if there are American force — if there’s American citizens left, we’re gonna stay till we get them all out.
CLAY: Blatant lies, Buck, and we’re going to be one of the few people in media who is actually going to hold the president accountable for the promises he made and the promises he has not kept. And the lies he’s telling. And if you just listen to that audio, it’s staggering, the duplicity, the lies.
BUCK: Yeah. Clay, they’re already doing what we said they were going to do, right?
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: Yesterday, remember when I said, “Clay, what do I expect?” We talked about this, that Joe Biden is going to start to focus on just the end state here of the end of the war in Afghanistan as all that matters, and the debacle of how we got to it, is irrelevant. Irrelevant, they want us to think, for whether Joe Biden is competent.
Irrelevant for whether the national security apparatus around him truly has experts that are worthy of the powers entrusted in them. They want to move past this. In fact, even worse, they want everyone to think, that somehow this was a stroke of brilliance, something to be deeply proud of.
Now, it’s tough. I will say this almost in Biden’s defense. We’re talking about him breaking promises. But he made those promises clearly under the incredibly false impression — and this also goes to the transcript of the call he had that has been leaked with Ashraf Ghani — that there was actually going to be a Taliban versus Afghan National Security Forces fight that would lasts for some period of time.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: So when he was making all those promises, he was in the wrongest of wrong zones for his assessment of Afghanistan.
CLAY: (laughing)
BUCK: Now, he still is breaking his word. I’m not saying that. But clearly, this guy had no idea what the heck was really going on, and that’s why now… People have been asking me, Clay — and this is one of the big debates that breaks out, one of the big discussions: Will this place become a safe haven for terror?
CLAY: Yeah.
And doing these things that give you a real sense of what’s going on. We hadn’t had that in a long time. We have retreated to the bases, and now we’ve cut that off entirely. So will it be a terrorist safe haven? Clay, we may not know until something goes boom; that’s the problem.
CLAY: Let me ask you this, Buck: You, unlike a lot of people who make a living talking, have actually done intelligence briefings. You’ve been on the ground in Afghanistan. How nervous are you about the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and one of these terror groups trying to do an attack, maybe overseas, but maybe even more so here in America?
Are you on high alert now in the wake of Afghanistan losing our ability to have a bunch of intelligence on the ground as we would have before? Are you nervous at all about somebody trying to strike us, to say, “Hey, 20 years later, we can still do the same thing that we did on 9/11?” Does that anniversary put you on edge, at all, from an intelligence perspective?
BUCK: Absolutely. The narrative here, really matters.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: This is why in jihadist literature and communications, they’ll make references to the Balfour Declaration.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: They’ll make reference to battles that occurred in Afghanistan or Syria or wherever hundreds of years ago.
CLAY: Years ago.
BUCK: Yeah, that are from hundreds of years ago that less than one-in-1,000 people in the West would have any idea what the heck they’re referencing. Narrative matters, and here’s what we’ve been going through with this. There’s been a downturn in the jihadist storyline, if you will —
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: — because of something that got very little attention during the presidency, and I actually had a member of Special Forces, a guy from Special Forces to come up to me to just say he appreciated during the Trump presidency, that I was talking about how they kicked butt in Syria.
CLAY: Yes.
The problem here, the concern, is that Afghanistan now has a huge propaganda victory to the forces of the global jihad once again. We’d had this low period, because of the destruction of ISIS.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: Largely, the destruction of ISIS. And if they were looking — and, Clay, I hate the, “Oh, we could get hit any moment. Oh, it’s an orange zone. No, it’s a yellow zone.”
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: Because at some point if you cry wolf every day, you’re not being helpful. But can we think of a better moment in time for the jihadist, evildoers around the world to reset the narrative of their victory, of their black banners being unfurled in cities and countries around the world, than to have a mass casualty attack of some kind on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, after the fall of Kabul and Afghanistan to the Taliban? I think it’s hard to come up with one.
CLAY: And this is why I bring it up, Buck. Because as I’ve mentioned, you actually have a lot of experience here. I’m sitting around looking at what will be going around on 9/11 and the day after 9/11. For the first time, people will be going back to mass crowds, to college footballs on the anniversary of 9/11 and to NFL games on the day after 9/11, and a couple of days before when the season kicks off.
That will be a moment of great celebration. I think for many Americans out there. But in the wake of Afghanistan, where America — I think it’s fair to say — nose, at the absolute best, has only been bloodied, right? We’ve been embarrassed by what happened in Afghanistan.
To your point on the narrative of jihadist attacks being able to strike on the 20th anniversary, and try to send a message of, “We kicked your ass out of Afghanistan, and we can still do damage to you even 20 years later,” it feels like a particularly dangerous time in terms of the goals of terrorists.
BUCK: It absolutely is, because the storylines that the jihadists tell, whether we’re talking about Al-Qaeda, or the Islamic State, or any of the other innumerable jihadist entities all over the world… I mean, there’s everything from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front to Palestinian Islamic Jihad. You could sit here and go through the list.
There’s Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. There are dozens of terrorist groups that operate in the AfPak region, that very few people know about. Literally dozens of them. And many of them have as a core tenet, attacking Western targets and waging jihad against the West. We’ve been in a downturn from that.
And I don’t mean the same in general terms. I mean actually, in many cases, the same human beings — the same people making decisions, not just philosophically, similar. And you have to look at this now and see Afghanistan… And the optics matter as well. Because we obviously thought there would be some fight back against the Taliban.
That that didn’t happen means that our whole notion of working with foreign partners to fight against these jihadist entities. Any time the jihadis — whether it’s in Yemen or northern Nigeria or it’s in Somalia or it’s in the Philippines, wherever they decide to start attacking. And hopefully, by the way, Clay —
CLAY: We don’t want this to happen, by the way.
BUCK: No, no. Of course we don’t want it to happen, and it may not happen.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: I’m somebody who believes you cannot predict the future. But if you look at the swirling pieces right now, and the players involved, between now and the 9/11 anniversary is a time for the black flag of jihad to be planted on a mass grave for a mass casualty attack somewhere in this country — I mean, somewhere in the world. That’s what I think is going to be a concern for all of us.
CLAY: And at the time, we have spent. You talked about how Trump did such a good job of going after of these jihadist organizations. We’ve actually turned crazily to the narrative of “h, the people that we’re in danger from in America. Are who? White supremacists!”
BUCK: The insurrectionists! That’s an excellent point, Clay. The primary counterterrorism mission under the Biden administration is bizarrely and psychotically, Trump voters.
CLAY: Yes. They’re the danger.
BUCK: According to the people in charge at the DOJ and DHS, it’s people that took selfies on January 6 in the Capitol Building. That’s the primary counterterrorism threat. We’ll see how long that narrative holds.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
BUCK: After Biden’s speech yesterday, which I wouldn’t even say… I thought it would be a somber victory from the Biden administration. But it was actually a defiant, gaslighting, aggressive victory lap. I know it’s bizarre to think of it that way. But that is what was expressed by Joe Biden. And already, the narrative is out there. They’ve got the talking points. They’re going with it. “This was pretty well done,” they’re trying to tell you. Here’s the White House chief of staff.
RON KLAIN: It’s easy to second guess, but let’s just be clear. America was in this war for 20 years. And I think any effort to unwind it, any effort to bring our troops out, any effort to end our military presence in Afghanistan, was going to be filled with, uhh, heartbreaking scenes and difficulties. And I think, uhh, the Biden administration managed that as well as it could be managed, under the circumstances we were placed in.
CLAY: (laughing)
BUCK: As good as anybody could have possibly thought it would be. I mean, sure, they dramatically miscalculated — and that’s putting it mildly — the speed of this whole thing. Sure, they left people behind. We’ve gone from “no man left behind,” to, “Nine out of ten of you will probably make it home,” and that’s supposed to be okay.
And now they’re trying to tell you that this was not only something that Biden will avoid major criticism or political fallout from. But it’s not that big a deal, because it was going to be rough no matter what. Here’s Claire McCaskill, another Democrat, doing cleanup on Aisle 5 for him.
MCCASKILL: I think he laid out exactly why he made this decision, and why he’s standing behind it. Umm, in many ways, I found it refreshing. You know, nobody really believed that the Afghan government would melt away as quickly as it did and that complicated this. But he’s right about one thing, Willie: You don’t ever announce you’re leaving the country and not have a rush to the exits. And that rush to the exits — whether it was the Bagram Air Force Base or whether it was at the Kabul Air Force Base — was always going to be really dangerous to the Americans trying, the military trying to process that!
BUCK: What will they not lie about, Clay? Is there anything?
CLAY: It is a level of blatant dishonesty that I’m not sure we’ve ever seen before, and what is so frustrating about it is the Washington Post headline, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” the New York Times’ “All the News That’s Fit to Print”? They’re not calling out any of these lies. If Donald Trump was president, and every single thing had happened in Afghanistan, the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, would be losing their minds to ridicule the president and demand, frankly, his impeachment over this.
And certainly, Buck, we need to talk about this later on in the show. How is it that nobody is having to get fired over this? Nobody is falling on their sword. Nobody is taking responsibility for the utter incompetence that this entire after began the mess, was involved in.
BUCK: Lieutenant Colonel Scheller is.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: He’s gone. The guy who said there should be accountability, he gets fired.
CLAY: Yes. That’s the only person who has lost his job over this. It’s shameful.
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