Exclusive — Kash Patel: Joe Biden Is on Vacation ‘While Afghanistan Is on Fire’

Kash Patel, former chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense, noted that President Joe Biden is on vacation “while Afghanistan is on fire” on Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

Patel, former head of the National Counterterrorism Center at the National Security Council during the Trump administration, said, “Here’s the biggest thing: on the most critical national security incident of the last 20 years — the Afghan withdrawal — President Biden isn’t even sitting at the White House. The commander-in-chief is not surrounded in-person by his advisers and is out on vacation.”

Biden left for a two-week vacation at Camp David on Friday. On Monday morning, Biden’s staff said he would return to the White House in the afternoon to publicly address unfolding events in Afghanistan.

Patel remarked, “They knocked President Trump for going away for a weekend round of golf, except I would go away with him for those weekends, and this man would work round the clock, non-stop, and there would be no gap in coverage in terms of how he ran the country.”

“I just don’t see that same zeal from the Biden administration,” he continued, “especially when they have out-of-office emails from a press secretary saying she’s out of office for the entire week while Afghanistan is on fire. So, there is a difference in not just what we did, but how we messaged it, and who was in the room when we did it.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki began her vacation Sunday. An email sent to her by Breitbart News was returned with an auto-reply message stating she is on vacation between August 15 and 22.

Patel said, “You have the commander-in-chief of the free world away on vacation while Afghanistan is imploding. [This] is emblematic of [how] he has politicized the national security apparatus of the United States and why this is almost effectively a surrender.”