On Monday, the U.S. State Dept. announced it had “facilitated the safe departure” of four U.S. citizens who escaped their native homeland by an overland route.
The leader of the U.S. security team, Cory Mills, called that claim “absolute nonsense” in an exclusive post-mission interview with Fox News.
“The fact that they're spinning this, trying to take 100% credit when they didn't track this family, when they placated this family,” he said. “When the mother, who was under extreme stress and extreme pressure, reached out to the State Department multiple times and got no help."
Mills, who is a Republican congressional candidate in Florida, is a U.S. Army veteran who helped escort the family to safety at a border crossing by tricking Taliban border guards with fake phone calls.
"I'm not surprised in the least. They don’t understand initiative,” Bob Maginnis, a national security analyst, says of the State Department’s dubious back-patting. “They also don't understand the obligation of government, especially what the Biden administration promised to do to get all Americans out.”
Mills told Fox News the mother, Mariam, and three children passed through dangerous Taliban checkpoints to approach the Kabul airport only to be turned away despite having the proper paperwork. A second plan to take a chartered flight from a second airport also failed, he said, which meant the third plan was an overland trip to a neighboring country that proved to be dangerous but successful.
A spokesman for the State Dept. told Fox News the federal agency “provided guidance” and “worked to facilitate their safe passage,” and U.S. embassy staff were present to greet them once they crossed the border.
Mills likened those claims to a football player carrying the ball to the “99-and-a-half yard line” and a teammate takes credit for the touchdown.
The mother and children live in the congressional district of U.S. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), who has said his congressional office attempted to work with the State Dept. for two weeks to arrange help. Once the family was safe, he said, the State Dept. got them tourist visas in the new country.
"The only thing the Biden Administration seems to be good at,” said Jackson, “is patting itself on the back for a job horribly done.”
“They totally failed,” Maginnis says of the Biden administration, “and now they're trying to do some patchwork --- and not doing a very good job of it as well."
Taliban not 'inclusive'
Regarding the coming weeks and months, Maginnis predicts the American public will witness a weak-looking Biden administration be bullied and pushed around by the Taliban.
In fact, a day after Maginnis talked to American Family News, Secretary of State Antony Blinkin admitted the Taliban was refusing to allow chartered flights of U.S. citizens to depart an Afghanistan airport in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif. He refused, however, to call the grounded flights a "hostage" situation.
Blinkin also complained that the new Taliban-led Afghan administration, which is filled with ruthless terrorists, was not meeting the "test of inclusivity" desired by the Biden administration.
"We tanked our integrity and our reliability as an ally," Maginnis warns. "And we'll just continue to be manipulated."
