During an interview with ABC News on Friday, Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) stated that he focuses on January 2021 when he thinks about how the situation in Afghanistan got to where it is because that’s when President Joe Biden took office and “the last president left us with an untenable situation, and the new president, Joe Biden, and his people let that go on too long.”
Himes said, “[Y]ou can go back twenty years, you can go back fifteen years, I focus on January. And the reason I focus on January is because you have a new president, and the new president inherits a situation where there are fewer people in — fewer U.S. military security people in Kabul than there are on Capitol Hill protecting the Congress of the United States after the January 6 insurrection, with the 1,000 or 2,000 people that you had in Afghanistan at that time, you were not — you had no options. And I know it’s fashionable, and sadly, in this very partisan environment, people are pointing the fingers at Biden, at Donald Trump. The reality is that January’s a key moment. Because the last president left us with an untenable situation, and the new president, Joe Biden, and his people let that go on too long.”
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