Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg took apart the motives behind a House Republican report on the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Transcript via CNN:
Tomorrow, we expect the House Foreign Affairs Committee to release the findings of its three-year investigation into what happened. How does Kamala Harris defend what we all saw?
BUTTIGIEG: First of all, of course, I haven’t seen what’s in the report coming out tomorrow, but I do have a question about what they’re doing over there.
If they have had three years to assess what happened, why are they delivering a report after Labor Day in a presidential election year? I think it really feeds in to a sense that this is something they’re using as a political football.
Look, this administration made the decision not to allow this war to be inherited by a fifth president and to end that conflict. And this is on my mind a lot in September, not just because of the anniversary of the withdrawal, but because it was September 10 years ago that I left Afghanistan.
And when I left, again, 10 years ago, 2014, they told us we were some of the last troops, that they were turning out the lights, only to find that it passed on to another presidency and another presidency after that.
What’s, of course, most at stake right now, as is true in any election, is our future. And what is going to be the future of American national security? Do we have adults, grownups in charge who understand the stakes, or do we have people who are incapable of taking even the most serious issues seriously?
And I think it’s especially revealing and important that, among Trump’s own advisers and appointees who have gone on to denounce him, to talk about him in scathing terms, to make clear that he has no business being president, so many of them come out of the national security side because they saw up close how dangerous it was to have him in charge of American national security and military affairs.
Video:
The report is a political stunt that House Republicans planned to help Donald Trump at his debate with Vice President Harris. It is obvious what the Republican House majority is trying to do. They are hoping that ABC News will pick up on the report and make it a topic during the debate.
Originally, this scheme was hatched in an effort to trip up President Biden. Now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee, House Republicans have tossed out Biden’s name and replaced it with Harris.
The stunt won’t work because people like Pete Buttigieg are calling it out before the report has been released, but it demonstrates how far Republicans are willing to go to abuse power to help Donald Trump.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
