On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said President Joe Biden pulled a bait and switch by leaving behind the majority of the Afghan allies that deserved to be saved, but bringing tens of thousands of Afghans to the U.S. who don’t have direct connections to the U.S. military and can’t be vetted.
Cotton said, “[T]his is one of the biggest bait and switches in American politics. Joe Biden appealed to the generosity and the sense of honor of the American people, who rightly wanted to save all those loyal Afghans who worked alongside our troops for the last 20 years. But his own administration now admits that they left the vast majority…of those Afghans who had been reviewed and vetted in Afghanistan. That means that tens of thousands of Afghans who had no direct connection to our military were evacuated out of the country and now are en route to our country in the days ahead.”
He continued, “Now, they say that they’re going to vet these Afghans, but that’s really not possible. I mean, Afghanistan is a third-world country, and now the Taliban are in control of it. There’s no local police department or FBI or credit check you can run on people sitting in Germany or Qatar or elsewhere. So, we really don’t know if they’re a security threat to our country or if they accept some of the basic principles of America like constitutional government or religious pluralism and toleration or equality and rights for women.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett