by Morgan Phillips at The Daily Mail
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday she was ‘not going to get into’ the bombshell July 23 phone call between President Biden and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, where he implored the Afghan leader to ‘change the perception’ of the war with the Taliban.
Psaki refused to comment as Republicans tore into the call where Biden told Ghani to try and show the world they were beating the Taliban ‘whether it is true or not.’
‘I’m not going to get into private diplomatic conversations or leaked transcripts of phone calls,’ the press secretary told reporters Wednesday.
‘The content of the reporting is consistent with what we have said many times publicly,’ she added.
‘No one anticipated, the vast majority, … anticipated that the Taliban would be able to take over the country as quickly as they did or that the Afghan national security forces would fold as quickly as they did.’
‘What the president conveyed publicly and certainly privately as well, repeatedly, to Afghan leaders is that it’s important that the leaders in Afghanistan do exactly that – lead, show the country they are ready to continue the fight.’
Two years ago, she demanded the White House release not only the transcript of former President Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky but the entire whistleblower complaint.
‘It is not just the call transcript. The whistleblower complaint would likely have more details. We need both. And not just the call,’ Psaki said in a tweet on Sept. 24, 2019, the day Trump’s White House released the transcript of his call with the Ukrainian leader.
Trump had been facing demands to release details of a complaint made by a member of the intelligence community about the call.
That call led to his eventual impeachment, where Democrats determined he had improperly pressured Zelensky to investigate a political opponent, Biden, and his son Hunter.
‘I’m disgusted that President Biden lied to the world to try to make everyone think the Taliban wasn’t taking over, when he knew they were rapidly gaining power. His lies cost us 13 American lives and Biden abandoned our allies when they needed us most,’ Rep. Lisa McClain, R-Mich., told DailyMail.com.
At least 170 people and 13 US troops were killed in a suicide bomb after the Taliban takeover as the US was evacuating Americans and allies in Kabul last week.
In a phone call transcript obtained by Reuters, Biden said the US would provide aid if Ghani could project to the world that he ‘had a plan’ for fighting the Taliban, while the Afghan army was being overrun.
Some say the call shows that Biden knew the situation was dire in Afghanistan way before the evacuation and flies in the face of claims from the administration that they had no idea the Taliban would take over so quickly. Other critics say Biden’s call shows he is ‘disconnected from the real world’ as he didn’t grasp Ghani’s warning that 15,000 terrorists were about to ‘invade’ Afghanistan.
Yet, the White House is sticking to its story, with Chief of Staff Ron Klain telling MSNBC late Tuesday that no one in the administration knew the Taliban would take over Afghanistan in just 12 days.
Reuters have not revealed how they obtained the transcript. But they said they could not reach Ghani or any of his representatives – raising the prospects that it could have come from inside the White House.
‘We will continue to provide close air support, if we know what the plan is,’ Biden said.
Biden focused much of the call on Ghani’s ‘perception problem.’
‘I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban,’ Biden said. ‘And there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.’…
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