Fact Check: Jake Sullivan Falsely Claims Biden Warned Americans Afghanistan Withdrawal Would Be ‘Difficult’

CLAIM: President Biden clearly told the American people the pullout from Afghanistan could be “difficult.”

VERDICT: FALSE. Biden repeatedly told the American people the pullout would be orderly and in consultation with allies.

White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan continued to spin the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan during a White House briefing on Monday, lauding the ongoing airlift. He also echoed Biden’s claim that any pullout would have involved scenes of chaos, regardless of when the U.S. left — a claim that contrasts sharply with what Biden told the world to expect.

When asked by a reporter why Biden had not told Americans that withdrawal would be difficult, Sullivan said:

All along, the president has been clear, that the United States was not going to enter a third decade of American military deployment in the middle of another country’s civil war. And in his speech in April, and in his speech in July, and in comments he has made since then, he has been clear that that could mean difficult times in Afghanistan. We have been clear-eyed about this from the start. But what we were not prepared to do, what the president was not prepared to do, was to say, that for that reason, we need to keep American men and women fighting and dying in this civil war.

Here is what Biden said in his April speech: “We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit. We’ll do it — we’ll do it responsibly, deliberately, and safely. And we will do it in full coordination with our allies and partners, who now have more forces in Afghanistan than we do.”

And here is what Biden said in his July speech: “The drawdown is proceeding in a secure and orderly way, prioritizing the safety of our troops as they depart.  … [T]he likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely. … There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.” He also said the U.S. would not leave the Afghan army vulnerable — that we would not “walk away and not sustain their ability to maintain that force.”
At no point in either speech did he warn that withdrawal would be “difficult.” (He never even used the word “difficult.”)

Jake Sullivan was a key figure in spreading the “Russia collusion” hoax, briefing reporters about supposed links between Trump and Russia, and testifying to Congress that he believed former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn had been involved in a conspiracy with the Russian government. Sullivan now occupies Flynn‘s former job at the White House.

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.