On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Varney & Co.,” Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL) said that the White House “deliberately misled” on the number of Americans in Afghanistan, and that he considers the Americans still in the nation hostages, with the administration “paying ransom in the form of aid.”
Waltz said, “Well, they didn’t get it wrong, Stuart, I think they’re — they deliberately misled the American people. You’ll notice, each time they put this quick little caveat, about a hundred that wanted to leave. Well, show me all these Americans that were there, trapped behind Taliban lines, that didn’t want to leave. The fact was, they had their families there, and I would love to ask Jen Psaki or Blinken or all the others if they would leave their family members behind, of course they wouldn’t. That doesn’t mean they get categorized as not deserving or not wanting to leave. So, it was deliberately misleading.”
He later added, “I consider them hostages, absolutely. And what the administration is doing is paying ransom in the form of aid. And what the Taliban ultimately want is international recognition, billions in foreign currencies, getting off the U.N. blacklist, and they want to be normalized. … At the end of the day, the administration wanted to spin us, make it seem like it wasn’t that many, turn the page, so they can move on to their progressive agenda.”
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