Matt Zeller Drops Truth MOAB on MSNBC

CLAY: The criticism has rained down on Joe Biden from basically every corner, and I thought we had a good discussion about this yesterday, Buck, that the usual Joe Biden defenders have vanished as it pertains to this situation surrounding Afghanistan. When some people… I’m gonna say, one of these guys was Brian Williams on MSNBC, who attempted to defend Joe Biden yesterday to CIA analyst Matt Zeller, who I know you are friends with, Buck, and you can react to this.

BUCK: He’s a former agency analyst.

CLAY: Yeah, former CIA analyst. He definitely did not tiptoe up to his opinion. This was on MSNBC yesterday responding to Brian Williams. Get your popcorn and enjoy.

WILLIAMS: He owned it. He owned his decision. He owned the fact that, as he put it, the buck stops with him.

ZELLER: I hope he gets to own their deaths too.

WILLIAMS: (silence)

ZELLER: I don’t… I feel like I watched a different speech than the rest of you guys. I was appalled. There was such a profound, bold-faced lie in that speech. The idea that planned for every contingency? I have been personally trying to tell this administration since it took office — I’ve been trying to tell our government for years — that this was coming. We sent them plan after plan on how to evacuate these people.

Nobody listened to us. They didn’t plan for the evacuation of our Afghan wartime allies. They’re trying to conduct it now at the 11th hour. The thing that they were most concerned about was at the optics of the chaotic evacuation. Well, they got exactly what they were most concerned of by failing to do what was right when we could have done it. We had all the people and equipment in place to be able to save these people months ago, and we did NOTHING!

BUCK: Now, Matt, as you mentioned, Matt and I go back, gosh, over a decade now. He’s been a friend of mine almost going on almost we’re gonna 20 years pretty soon and we were talking about this guy texting back and forth. He cofounded this organization, No One Left Behind. This also the focus of the organization is avoiding what’s happening right now.

And it’s been out there for years through multiple administrations trying to say, “Let’s streamline the process,” and this is for the real, embedded interpreters and their families and people that are working alongside U.S. troops who a promise was made to. I know I hear from a lot of veterans who say, “Oh, let’s take in a million Afghan refugees tomorrow because the country’s in bad shape.”

And, “Let’s take in the thousands of people who were promised by the U.S. government that if they served alongside us — if they worked alongside our men and women in uniform out in combat — that they would be brought home,” and Matt is furious. I also just love that Brian Williams is acting like (impression), “That was a great speech by Biden, really taking ownership,” and Matt’s like, “That’s bull crap.”

CLAY: (laughing) All I needed to hear from Brian Williams was about his recollections of being under fire. The only thing that could have made that segment any better is if he said, “Having been under fire in the Middle East before…”

BUCK: Yeah. Yeah. (impression) “No crap, three RPGs went whistling past my head!”

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: “I did a karate chop to take down one of Mullah Omar’s top lieutenants and then I still showed up on time for my 8 p.m. hit on MSNBC.”

CLAY: He got lit up, and that opening line was a devastating opening line from your boy Matt Zeller there because sometimes you hear an interview and you kind of lean back and take a breath. That was a good one. That’s a great opener.