‘The president never shies away from taking questions’: White House defends Biden not facing reporters for NINE DAYS during the Afghanistan fiasco and now insists he knew Kabul’s rapid collapse was possible

• The president avoided reporters’ questions after remarks about COVID-19 Wednesday
• He spoke to the nation Monday but did not face reporters
• Biden held a sit-down with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos where he said there would always have been ‘chaos’ amid a U.S. departure from Afghanistan
• White House has released still photo images of his meetings with security team
• Biden speaks again Friday before heading to Wilmington
• Vice President Kamala Harris will be with him
• WH Comms Director Kate Bedingfield said Biden would make the decision on whether to take questions from the press at his event
• She told MSNBC that at any point where the U.S. began an evacuation ‘it was going to signal the imminent collapse of the Afghan government’

The White House said Friday that President Joe Biden ‘never shies’ away from taking questions – after the president has been slammed for avoiding White House reporters’ questions amid the chaos in Afghanistan.

The statement about Biden’s willingness to face the press came as the White House communications team has kept Biden away from the reporters who follow him – and the president has avoided his typical proclivity to engage with them on issues of the day, even amid the unfolding international crisis. 

Biden spoke from the White House on Wednesday about the coronavirus amid the evolving situation in Afghanistan, as his administration struggles to fire up a massive evacuation to get thousands of Americans, Afghans, and allied personnel out of the country after the fall of Kabul. 

But he ignored a chorus of shouted questions about the situation there.   

‘The president never shies away from taking questions, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield told MSNBC in an interview Friday morning. 

‘The president never shies away from taking questions,’ White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield said when asked if President Biden would respond to reporters on Friday. He last took questions on August 10 following Senate passage of infrastructure legislation

‘I’ll let him make a decision on whether he’s going to take questions this afternoon. But you saw he just did a full sit down interview on this just yesterday. So he is always willing to take questions, and I’ll let him decide if he is going to do that after his remarks today,’ she said.

Bedingfield was referencing a sit-down Biden did with ABC’s George Stephanpoulos, where he said there was always going to be ‘chaos’ when the U.S. departed after the 20-year war. 

Biden did speak to the country about Afghanistan Monday, but again took no questions from the White House press.

The last time he took questions was at a press conference on August 10th after Senate passage of infrastructure legislation and a budget resolution. 

WH Comms Director Kate Bedingfield took questions about the situation in Afghanistan in a TV interview Friday. Biden was set to speak to the press – but she said she would leave it to him to decide whether to take questions

Biden avoided questions after a Wednesday speech on the coronavirus

Back on July 2nd, before the Taliban takeover of the country, a Biden quip signaled the sensitivity of the topic he was trying to avoid. ‘I want to talk about happy things man,’ he said when asked about Afghanistan.

Bedingfield, who gave an interview amid a downpour from the White House lawn Friday, was asked about Biden’s July 8th comments when he said a Taliban takeover was not an inevitability.     

‘He was talking about whether this was a possibility and not an inevitability. And that’s an important distinction. Look, obviously as we’ve seen in all the reporting the last week, the president saw a wide array of intelligence,’ she responded. 

‘But you heard from [Joint Chiefs Chairman] General Milley, you heard from Director [of National Intelligence] Haynes; they saw no intelligence that suggested that Kabul would fall within 11 days. That was not a scenario that was put in front of the president,’ she said. 

‘So he saw a wide array of intelligence. But ultimately at the end of the day, he’s the commander in chief and the buck stops with him. He made the decision.

 She also spoke to the state of play of evacuations: she said 9,000 people have been taken out since the Taliban takeover, with 14,000 since July. 

‘We have taken control of the airport. Flights are leaving regularly. And I would say, that’s not something that happens without planning, that’s not something that just happened. The president planned for multiple contingencies,’ she said. ‘And that’s why he prepositioned troops in the Gulf able to move in immediately, taking control of the airport and setting up flights to get people out of the country. It’s the mission that he is laser focused on, getting every American who wants to leave Afghanistan out of Afghanistan, and moving people out as quickly as possible.’

Interviewer Willie Geist asked if the chaos on the ground pointed to why the U.S. should have evacuated people before pulling out most U.S. troops. 

‘I’m glad you asked this, because this is a question people have raised,’ she responded. ‘I think  it’s important to remember that at any point that we began a mass evacuation of Americans and Afghan allies out of Afghanistan, it was going to signal the imminent collapse of the Afghan government it was going to be a chaotic situation whether it happened five months ago, whether it happened five weeks ago or whether it happened this week,’ she said. 

‘So our effort was to continue to try to ensure that the Afghan government had the opportunity to remain in place.’ 

Asked why Biden wasn’t loudly condemning the Taliban – who the military has been communicating with through channels and who have been allowing the evacuation to continue, despite a crackdown on dissent – she responded: ‘Of course he does not condone that kind of behavior. The most important thing in this moment right now is to get people out of the country who want to get out of the country.’

 But she called human rights abuses ‘appalling’ and ‘horrifying.’   

Biden v. Reality: Biden falsely stated the US has no troops in Syria – when there are 900 – in a series of lies of bungled statements in ABC interview 

Biden says there was ‘no way’ to leave Afghanistan without chaos ensuing, but six weeks ago he said a Taliban takeover was ‘highly unlikely.’

Biden told Stephanopoulos that chaos in Kabul was always in the cards for an Afghanistan withdrawal, but just six weeks ago he said that a Taliban takeover was ‘highly unlikely.’

‘There’s no way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don’t know how that happens,’ the president said in a Wednesday interview.  

In his July 8 briefing, Biden assured the press: ‘It is not inevitable. The likelihood of the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.’   

And even though the president said mayhem was inevitable, he laid blame on Afghani forces unwilling to fight and President Ashraf Ghani who fled the country.

‘When you had the government of Afghanistan, the leader of that government, get in a plane and taking off and going to another country; when you saw the significant collapse of the Afghan troops we had trained, up to 300,000 of them, just leaving their equipment and taking off – that was, you know, I’m not, that’s what happened. That’s simply what happened’, he said. 

Biden says US doesn’t have a military presence in Syria, but 900 troops remain there.

The president told Stephanopoulos that al-Qaeda could build up a significant presence in Afghanistan sooner than the original intelligent assessment of 18 to 24 months, but the US should be more worried about the threat from al-Qaeda in Syria.

‘Al Qaeda, ISIS, they metastasize. There’s a significantly greater threat to the United States from Syria. There’s a significantly greater threat from East Africa. There’s significant greater threat to other places in the world than it is from the mountains of Afghanistan,’ Biden said. 

‘We have maintained the ability to have an over-the-horizon capability to take them out. We’re– we don’t have military in Syria to make sure that we’re gonna be protected–‘  

The US does in fact have troops in Syria – 900 of them. Those troops are advising and supporting the Syrian Democratic Forces to fight the Islamic State, a role they have played since the US-led intervention in 2014.

Biden says he can’t recall military officials suggesting he keep the ‘stable’ 2,500 troop presence in Afghanistan, though reports show Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley made exactly such a request. 

‘Your top military advisers warned against withdrawing on this timeline – they wanted you to keep about 2,500 troops,’ Stephanopoulos said to Biden.

‘No, they didn’t,’ the president pushed back. ‘It was split. That wasn’t true. That wasn’t true.’

‘They didn’t tell you they wanted troops to stay?’ Stephanopoulos asked.

‘No, not in terms of whether we were going to get out in a time frame – all troops, they didn’t argue against that,’ Biden reiterated.

The Wall Street Journal reported the president ignored Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley’s request to keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan and did not yield Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s warning about the stability of the country without a U.S. troop presence. 

Stephanopoulos pressed the president on the report: ‘Your military advisers did not tell you, ‘No, we should just keep 2,500 troops, it’s been a stable situation for the last several years, we can do that, we can continue to do that?’

‘No, no one said that to me that I can recall,’ Biden said.

An exasperated Milley declined to rule out ‘regrets’ on Thursday. ‘Right now the focus is on the mission [evacuating Americans and allies] … there will be plenty of time to talk about regrets,’ he said when asked if the US should have done anything differently.  

Biden argued that the recent stability was not due to the troop presence but due to a peace deal with the Taliban signed by President Trump promising US forces would leave, which Biden has said he was bound to honor.   

Milley did say on Wednesday intelligence had only predicted Kabul could fall to the Taliban in a matter of weeks, months or years, not days. 

‘There’s nothing that I or anyone saw indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days,’ Milley added, further reflecting the Biden administration’s frustration with Afghan security forces they believe were unwilling to fight. 

‘This comes down to an issue of will and leadership. And no, I did not, nor did anyone else, see a collapse of an army of that size in 11 days,’ Milley underscored again. 

Biden says US has control of Kabul airport, though Taliban fighters have formed a wall around the airport and are controlling who goes in and out. 

‘Now, granted, it took two days to take control of the airport. We have control of the airport now,’ Biden told Stephanopoulos. 

Heart-wrenching scenes on Monday showed Afghanis desperate to flee throwing themselves in front of US aircraft taxiing down the runway. US service members fired shots killing at least two civilians in an effort to push the Afghans back behind airport walls to clear out Americans. 

And on Wednesday night US troops used teargas and fired shots into the air to control the increasingly desperate crowds of Afghans at the airport, while Taliban fighters blocked Westerners from getting to evacuation planes in a fifth day of chaos.

The Taliban appear to be tightening their grip, instituting checkpoints and stopping people from even getting to the airport, and there are no troops there on the ground to retrieve them because they are all at the airport defending it from a stampede of frightened natives. 

The Taliban has promised foreign governments that they will let through all Westerners and civilians who want to board flights, but even ABC journalists were blocked from getting to the airport on Thursday despite having paperwork proving who they were. 

Since Aug. 14, only 7,000 have been evacuated, though Biden said the US was trying to bring home 10,000-15,000 Americans and another 50,000-60,000 Afghanis, all by Aug. 31 – 12 days from now. 

Between Tuesday and Wednesday, US forces only removed 2,000 people on 18 jets that could have taken 10,000. 

Some on the ground called it a ‘lottery’ and described people with paperwork getting through but being turned away, while others without any ticket out are making their way onto planes through luck and force. 

On Wednesday, Afghan mothers who can’t get through handed their babies over the wall to Western soldiers to be put on flights without them. American troops have been seen helping some women over the barbed wire, while shouting at others to stand back. 

Biden says ‘no one is being killed’ at Kabul airport, though the Taliban have killed at least 12. 

‘But, look, b– but no one’s being killed right now, God forgive me if I’m wrong about that, but no one’s being killed right now,’ Biden told Stephanopoulos when the ABC anchor noted ‘pandemonium’ at the Kabul airport. 

There are at least 12 confirmed deaths in the chaotic scenes around the airport, according to Taliban and NATO officials. Those deaths included the two who were shot by the US military at the airfield and two who fell to their deaths from a US plane as it took off. 

Their deaths were caused by either gunshots or stampedes, a Taliban official told Reuters on Thursday. He told Afghans to go home if they didn’t have the proper paperwork to leave, adding a veiled warning: ‘We don’t want to hurt anyone at the airport.’ 

Biden says Afghani stowaways plunging to their death was ‘four or five days ago,’ – it was two days before the interview. 

‘We’ve all seen the pictures. We’ve seen those hundreds of people packed into a C-17. You’ve seen Afghans falling –’ Stephanopoulos said before being cut off by the president.

‘That was four days ago, five days ago,’ Biden quipped, seemingly brushing off harrowing footage that emerged on Monday of two Afghans falling to their deaths after clinging to the wheels of a US evacuation flight,

‘What did you think when you first saw those pictures?’

‘What I thought was we have to gain control of this,’ he said. ‘We have to move this more quickly. We have to move in a way in which we can take control of that airport. And we did.’

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