As Biden Abandons Americans, Ned Price Says State Department Deserves More Credit

State Department spokesperson Ned Price tweeted an op-ed Monday evening, as Americans were abandoned in Afghanistan, declaring that the State Department “deserves more credit for its effort to evacuate Americans from Afghanistan.”

The tweet struck many as in extremely poor taste, as the Biden administration admitted that it had left hundreds of Americans in Afghanistan, some of whom were unable to reach the airport in Kabul and board rescue flights.

As Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, Secretary of State Tony Blinken was on vacation in the Hamptons. The U.S. embassy, which officials had assured the world would remain opened, began destroying documents, and eventually fled to the airport. The administration admitted it did not know how many Americans were in the country, and the embassy gave Americans contradictory information about whether to approach the airport or not. The debacle was capped on Monday when Blinken emerged, instead of President Joe Biden, to insist that a new dawn of diplomacy had begun in Afghanistan.

The op-ed that Price tweeted, predictably written by Never Trump columnist Jennifer Rubin, praised the State Department for its “the herculean effort to extract thousands of Americans after the Taliban seized control of the country.”
On Twitter, Rubin also compared the Afghanistan airlift to Schindler’s List, the effort by industrialist Oskar Schindler to save Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Price has attempted, for the past two weeks, to put a positive spin on the pullout, hailing the “unprecedented airlift operation, that no other administration” had ever attempted before. That remark prompted Matt Lee of the Associated Press to retort: “Ned, you can pat yourself on the back all you want.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.