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Tags: crisis | response | plan | statedepartment | taliban

Raheem Kassam to Newsmax: Biden Halted Trump's 'Crisis Response' Plan

By    |   Wednesday, 18 August 2021 05:37 PM EDT

Just months before the weekend's crisis left thousands of Americans behind enemy lines in Afghanistan, President Joe Biden's State Department halted a Trump administration program to evacuate Americans from crisis zones, according to National Pulse Editor in Chief Raheem Kassam on Newsmax.

"We are reporting this afternoon that Joe Biden's State Department actively quashed a program that was started under President Donald J. Trump that was meant to enable the U.S. government to extract people swiftly and safely from crisis zones from around the world, including places like Afghanistan," Kassam told Wednesday's "Eric Bolling: The Balance."

The "Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau" was put into place by Trump last October, according to the report, with the "very, very specific purpose of helping extract Americans from crisis zones," Kassam told host Eric Bolling.

"That includes ordinary citizens, and it includes diplomats, it includes members of the U.S government in many different shapes and forms," he continued. "The Biden administration began to squash this plan in February, we have published documentation that proves it this afternoon."

An earlier example of such a crisis would be the infamous 2012 Benghazi attack, a coordinated assault on two U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, by the Islamic militant group Ansar al-Sharia. On Sept. 11, 2012, its members struck the diplomatic compound in Benghazi. This led to the deaths of Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens and Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith.

The State Department terminated the program under Secretary of State Antony Blinken on June 11, according to a "sensitive but unclassified" memo from Deputy Secretary of State Brian McKeon, which was obtained by The National Pulse.

The CCR provided for "medical, diplomatic, and logistical support" for Americans stranded in crisis zones overseas, according to the report.

The State Department budget noted the pause on page 29 of its 2022 plan.

Biden has come under fire for failing to evacuate an estimated 11,000 "self-identified" Americans in Afghanistan before the Taliban took control of the failed Afghanistan government this weekend.

"It seems to me that there is something more to it than just incompetence here," Kassam said. "This was a program that was well established. In fact, it was actually under the Obama administration that they set up this first program called OpMed. What the Trump administration attempted to do in October was give more focus to extracting Americans from crisis situations."

"What it seems like to me is that there is a cadre of national security people around President Biden who not only just are actively incompetent but actually may not care in the round about American citizens, American foreign policy," he added.

"These are people like [Biden National Security Adviser] Jake Sullivan."

In a Fox News interview Wednesday night on "Hannity," Trump stressed he would have gotten Americans out first, before securing U.S. military equipment and weapons, and pulled the troops out last. Trump rebuked the Biden administration's botched withdrawal as "humiliating" and "greatest embarrassment in the history of the country."

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Eric Mack

Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.

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Just months before the weekend's crisis left thousands of Americans behind enemy lines in Afghanistan, President Joe Biden's State Department halted a Trump administration program to evacuate Americans from crisis zones...
crisis, response, plan, statedepartment, taliban
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2021-37-18
Wednesday, 18 August 2021 05:37 PM
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