Report: Afghan National Accused of Plotting ISIS Election Day Attack Did Not Face ‘Stringent’ Vetting

An Afghan national, accused of plotting an Election Day Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist attack after having been resettled in the United States by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’s administration, reportedly did not undergo as rigorous a vetting process as previously claimed by Department of Justice (DOJ) officials.

Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, a 27-year-old Afghan national, and an unnamed co-conspirator were arrested in Oklahoma on October 7 by federal law enforcement agents and charged after they purchased two AK-47s that they allegedly planned to use to carry out an ISIS-backed terrorist attack on Americans on Election Day this year.

Tawhedi was resettled in Oklahoma City thanks to Biden and Harris’s mass resettlement program, known as Operation Allies Welcome, which started immediately after the U.S. Armed Forces withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021.

The federal indictment against Tawhedi had suggested that the Afghan national arrived in the United States in September 2021 on humanitarian parole, as most Afghans did, and later applied for a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV), which entails a much more thorough vetting process.

But according to sources who spoke to Fox News Digital’s Jacqui Heinrich, Tawhedi never faced SIV vetting, nor did he apply for the visa.

Heinrich wrote on X:

The Biden-Harris administration now admits that an Afghan national accused of plotting an election day terror attack did not undergo certain vetting they previously claimed he passed. Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi was never vetted or approved by the State Department for special immigrant (SIV) status, despite officials from other agencies claiming that he cleared that stringent process.

Additionally, sources familiar with the investigation tell FOX that Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi was not well known to the US government when the administration facilitated his departure to the U.S., despite his security role with the CIA in Afghanistan. FOX has learned Tawhedi was employed as a local guard outside the base perimeter and he would not have been among the most thoroughly vetted U.S. partners. [Emphasis added]

…

Officials now acknowledge Tawhedi was never vetted or approved for special immigrant (SIV) status, a thorough State Department process which can take years to complete. The State Department has maintained all along it had no role in Tawhedi’s refugee status, despite what a DHS case agent told investigators — leading to its inaccurate mention in the DOJ criminal complaint. [Emphasis added]

Biden-Harris administration officials said Tawhedi was recurrently vetted as part of his humanitarian parole status. Sources told Heinrich that the vetting process for Tawhedi and other Afghan nationals who arrived on such parole was hardly thorough.

Federal prosecutors are still unsure when exactly Tawhedi pledged allegiance to ISIS.

Nearly 100,000 Afghan nationals were brought to the United States within months of the disastrous retreat from Kabul, and many were not screened or vetted in person by federal agents, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and State Department have admitted.

The resettlement operation has been plagued with reported vetting failures since its inception when Afghans started arriving at Dulles International Airport in 2021.

In April 2023, a former Department of Defense (DOD) official revealed to Congress that some Afghans were resettled in the United States before they were found to have been involved in placing improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Afghanistan to kill American troops.

In 2021, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) requested information about the number of Afghans who sought entry to the U.S. and were listed on the federal government’s “No Fly List” because of their ties to Islamic terrorism. Biden’s top agency officials have refused to disclose the total.

In September 2022, the DHS Inspector General (IG) issued a bombshell report detailing how the Biden administration brought Afghans to the United States who were “not fully vetted” and could “pose a risk to national security.”

Similarly, in February 2022, a DOD IG report revealed that Biden’s agencies failed to properly vet Afghans who arrived in the United States and that about 50 Afghans were flagged for “significant security concerns” after their resettlement.

Most of the unvetted Afghans flagged for possible terrorism ties, the DOD IG report stated, have since disappeared into American communities. The report noted that as of September 17, 2021, only three of 31 Afghans flagged with specific “derogatory information” could be located.

In August 2022, Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) detailed allegations from a whistleblower who claimed the Biden administration knowingly resettled almost 400 Afghans in the United States who were listed as “potential threats” in federal databases and urged staff to cut corners in the vetting process.

In May 2022, a Project Veritas report alleged the Biden administration resettled Afghans listed on the federal government’s “Terrorism Watch List” in American communities.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.