U.S. Rep. Cory Mills, R-Florida, made good on his promise earlier this year to file articles of impeachment against Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. On Friday, he filed one article of impeachment against Austin alleging high crimes and misdemeanors.
Mills appears to be the first to file an article of impeachment against a Defense secretary in U.S. history.
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Voters should remember that a President’s role is primarily foreign affairs, which includes trade and border security. In 2016, and today, President Trump is the only candidate that has consistently focused on what the actual job of the president is, rather than what those with outsized influence want it to be.
President Trump is the first president to start no new wars since Jimmy Carter. Like Carter, he also affected a Middle East peace deal with Israel – not just one of them, but four. Arguably the first realist president since Richard Nixon, Trump’s combination of unpredictability enforced by blunt and brutal talk, credible military deterrence reinforced through a more robust military that was less used and overstretched, and a genuine and authentic desire to be a peace-maker created a moment in time for cooperation and peace through strength. Unfortunately, under Biden, the promise of peace has become a Shakespearean tragedy when considering our present dilemma in Europe and East Asia.
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Border Patrol has seen 1,000% increases in migrants coming from Afghanistan, China and other countries far from U.S. borders between fiscal year 2022 to fiscal year 2023.
The surges include migrants from Algeria, Djibouti, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mauritania, Paraguay and Vietnam, outgoing Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz wrote on Twitter Friday. It has been challenging to deport such migrants, Ortiz said.
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An Afghan national on the federal Terrorist Screening Dataset (TSDS) was apprehended attempting to enter the U.S. illegally near the Otay Mesa Port of Entry in San Diego, California.
The TSDS is the federal government’s database that includes sensitive information about terrorist identities. It originated as a consolidated terrorist watch list “to house information on known or suspected terrorists (KSTs) but has evolved over the last decade to include additional individuals who represent a potential threat to the United States, including known affiliates of watch listed individuals,” CBP states.
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WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — Taking a different position than his old boss on a key foreign policy issue, former Vice President Mike Pence told a gathering of Iowans Saturday that the U.S. must continue to help provision Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression. While he repeatedly trumpeted “Trump-Pence” successes, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate definitely differs with potential top presidential race rivals, former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, on U.S. involvement in the war-torn European country.
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Failed 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Friday America is now comparable to the Taliban in Afghanistan and Sudan after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, returning abortion decisions to the states.
“It’s so shocking to think that in any way we’re related to poor Afghanistan and Sudan,” Clinton said, according to Fox News, regarding abortion rights during the Women’s Voices Summit at the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas. “But as an advanced economy as we allegedly are, on this measure, we unfortunately are rightly put with them.”
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There’s lots not to like about the war in Ukraine, and people should be allowed to argue the case without being demonized by those who have a different opinion. But the more those who urge caution are demonized as pro-Putin by the pro-war people, the more they, and probably their audience, become suspicious, or should become suspicious, of the pro-war faction.
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Fort Hood, Texas, is named after John Bell Hood, a West Point graduate and Confederate general. The Army wants to rename the base after the late General Richard Cavazos, a hero of the Korean and Vietnam wars. This selection bypasses qualified candidates with a history on the base, such as Lieutenant Colonel Juanita Warman.
An expert in post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, Warman received an Army Commendation Medal for service at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, the facility where soldiers injured in Afghanistan and Iraq received treatment before returning stateside. Warman loved her work and volunteered for flights to Iraq to care for soldiers.
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Two months ago, explosions and gunfire tore through a Sikh house of worship in Kabul, Afghanistan. Seven attackers, reportedly part of ISIS-K, the Afghanistan affiliate of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, tried to storm the temple on a Saturday morning, throwing grenades at security guards standing at the entrance. One gunman began firing on those worshipping inside; another attacker detonated a vehicle parked outside the temple.
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The frantic and deadly U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan was so disorganized that 1,450 children were evacuated without their parents, and senior leaders in Vice President Kamala Harris’ and first lady Jill Biden’s offices, as well as one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked private veteran groups for assistance evacuating certain people from the country.
In the waning days of the evacuation, more than 1,000 women and girls waited more than 24 hours on dozens of buses, desperately circling the Kabul airport and trying to avoid Taliban checkpoints. Many of them were told multiple times they were not allowed to enter the airport. Now, nearly a year since the Taliban took control of the country, fewer than one-third of them have managed to flee the country.
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GOP nominee in VA-08 Karina Lipsman wants to focus on public safety, the economy, education, and mental health. Lipsman is battling Representative Don Beyer (D-VA-08) in a deep-blue district, and was nominated at the end of May in a ranked-choice convention. “We live in Northern Virginia. We don’t live in,…
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At a time of tectonic shifts in foreign policy alliances, with Russia and China forming a new pact and aggressively asserting themselves on the international stage, Washington’s national security community is splintered across the ideological spectrum on how best to counter the dual threats.
Yet, even before Russia invaded Ukraine, a group of national security practitioners, military veterans, and scholars began trying to move beyond their policy differences to help repair the damage inflicted by the last U.S. foreign policy failure – the chaotic U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan nearly seven months ago.
When the Vandenberg Coalition, a group of primarily Republican experts representing diverse foreign policy views and approaches, began their Afghanistan assessment, its members couldn’t have known that international alarm over Russia’s bloody land grab would soon eclipse the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan. Some national security experts believe that the two U.S. foreign policy nightmares are inextricably linked – that America’s ignominious retreat in Afghanistan emboldened Vladimir Putin to move on Ukraine.
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Every single one of senile president Joe Biden’s struggles was easily foreseeable.
It’s a bold statement, since many if not most of the issues that confront a new president can’t always be seen from a distance. If it can be said that elections are always about the future, it’s just as true to claim that the future would almost certainly be shaped by yet unseen events and circumstances that no politician could forthrightly discuss in the lead-up to his victory.
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The Biden administration failed to use all available screening data to vet Afghan refugees brought to the United States last year, allowing at least 50 individuals posing “potentially significant security concerns” to make it inside America’s borders, the Pentagon’s chief watchdog is warning.
To make matters worse, the Defense Department inspector general reported to Congress this week that 28 of 31 Afghan evacuees with known “derogatory information” can no longer be located.
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Thousands of Americans were left in Afghanistan after the Biden Administration’s botched withdrawal last summer, according to a stunning new report released by the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other Biden administration officials claimed that number of Americans left behind was only 100-150.
According to the report, published by Foreign Relations ranking member Jim Risch (R-Idaho), the Biden Administration “did not hold a senior-level interagency meeting to discuss an evacuation or formally task the State Department (State) to contact at risk populations, including Americans, until August 14, just hours before Kabul fell.”
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The Biden administration was still unsure on basic parts of evacuation from Afghanistan hours before the Taliban seized control of Kabul, according to a leaked memo obtained by Axios.
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On Wednesday, after a nearly two-month pause, another evacuation flight departed the country of Afghanistan en route for the United States.
According to CNN, the flight was a Qatar Airways flight that departed from Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, paid for by the United States government, with an unknown number of American citizens on board. It is the first such flight since November.
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Voters have swung in favor of Congressional Republicans’ handling of key issues by a significant margin as the midterm elections draw closer, newly released polling shows.
The Politico/Morning Consult poll released Wednesday reports that surveyed voters prefer Republicans work on the economy, jobs, immigration and national security. These figures, the latest in several polls showing poor numbers for Democrats, come alongside more than two dozen Congressional Democrats opting not to run for reelection.
The poll found voters prefer Republicans’ handling of the economy to Democrats 47% to 34%, Republicans’ work on jobs 45% to 35%, immigration 45% to 37% and national security 49% to 32%.
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President Joe Biden has stumbled, mumbled, and bumbled his way through his first year in office. While many of his gaffes leave us laughing, much of what comes out of his mouth isn’t just nonsense, it’s outright lies. Here’s a look at Biden’s Top 10 Lies of the past year.
Georgia election reforms
Biden claimed “Georgia’s new law ends voting hours early so working people can’t cast their vote.”
Even the Washington Post called Biden out for this lie (after the paper repeatedly repeated it for months!)
Biden repeatedly condemned a new Georgia election law that imposed new restrictions on voting, but one of his complaints was simply false: “It ends voting hours early so working people can’t cast their vote after their shift is over.” Many listeners might assume he was talking about voting on Election Day. But Election Day hours were not changed. The law did make some changes to early voting. But experts say the net effect of the new early-voting rules was to expand the opportunities to vote for most Georgians, not limit them.
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President Biden this past weekend suggested he would be willing to lose his presidency over his decisions on several key issues including his widely criticized withdrawal from Afghanistan.
In a CBS “Sunday Morning” interview in which he was asked whether he was discouraged by the criticism over his handling of the pandemic and other first-year challenges, Biden answered “No.”
“But look,” he continued. “One of the things we did decide, and I mean this, my word as a Biden, I know what I’m willing to lose over. If we walk away from the middle class, if we walk away from trying to unify people, if we start to engage in the same kind of politics that the last four years has done? I’m willing to lose over that.”
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The Taliban banned forced marriages in a Friday decree, saying that women are free persons and not property.
“Both (women and men) should be equal,” the decree said, according to ABC News. “No one can force women to marry by coercion or pressure.”
The Taliban ordered courts to allow widows to seek the inheritance of their families and to choose who they marry after their husbands die rather than being forced to marry an in-law, ABC News reported. The Taliban reportedly seeks an end to the practice of forcing women into marriage for money or to settle disputes.
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President Joe Biden’s approval rating has dropped to its lowest level since taking office.
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that Biden’s approval rating has plummeted in recent months among steadily rising inflation, a difficult withdrawal from Afghanistan, and other economic issues.
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This is one of the greatest votes of no confidence in the 21st Century.
Against the destructive policies of President Joe Biden, a torrent of spending that has brought back memories of the 1970s — surging inflation as the middle class are taxed their savings at the grocery store and then scenes of American defeat overseas in Afghanistan that stranded hundreds of Americans and thousands of American allies, who now suffer under the tyranny of the Taliban.
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The U.S. announced it will provide an additional $144 million in aid to Afghanistan as part of efforts to help citizens in the country in a statement by Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday.
The assistance brings the total amount of aid to Afghanistan to $474 million in 2021, making the U.S. the top aid donor to the country out of any nation, the statement wrote.
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The U.S. State Department joined an initiative to welcome Afghan refugees into the country that is sponsored by organizations supporting groups with possible ties to Palestinian terrorist organizations, a Daily Caller News Foundation review found.
Welcome.US is part of the Office of American Possibilities initiative, a project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, according to its website. The initiative’s main co-chairs include former President Barack Obama, former First Lady Michelle Obama, former President George W. Bush, former First Lady Laura Bush, former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The initiative also formed a coalition composed of nonprofit leaders and organizations, former government officials, corporate leaders and public figures. Businesses, including Starbucks, Uber, Facebook, Microsoft, Walmart and Airbnb, also support the effort.
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U.S. intelligence agencies failed to predict how quickly Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, would fall to the Taliban, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
Four agencies tracked the Taliban’s gains around Afghanistan starting in the spring of 2020 up until Taliban insurgents overthrew the U.S.-supported government in the capital city of Kabul, according to classified materials reviewed by the WSJ.
Around two dozen of the reports the WSJ reviewed predicted the Afghan government would collapse after U.S. forces withdrew, though none of them thought the government would fall as quickly as it did or with American troops still deployed in the region.
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Secretary of State Antony Blinken confirmed Wednesday the State Department is conducting an internal review into the evacuation of Afghanistan.
“It’s absolutely critical that we capture and benefit from lessons learned,” Blinken said in a speech at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia, attended by lawmakers, diplomats and others.
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After three weeks in Europe and extensive discussions with dozens of well-informed and highly placed individuals from most of the principal Western European countries, including leading members of the British government, I have the unpleasant duty of reporting complete incomprehension and incredulity at what Joe Biden and his collaborators encapsulate in the peppy but misleading phrase, “We’re back.”
As one eminent elected British government official put it, “They are not back in any conventional sense of that word. We have worked closely with the Americans for many decades and we have never seen such a shambles of incompetent administration, diplomatic incoherence, and complete military ineptitude as we have seen in these nine months. We were startled by Trump, but he clearly knew what he was doing, whatever we or anyone else thought about it. This is just a disintegration of the authority of a great nation for no apparent reason.”
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Nearly 450 American citizens are estimated to remain in Afghanistan almost two months after U.S. troops withdrew from the country, according to the Pentagon.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken originally said the Biden administration believed there to be “under 200, and likely closer to 100, who remain in Afghanistan and want to leave,” on Aug. 30, the day before the last Anerican troops left Afghanistan.
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Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday faced a litany of hard-edged Senate questions about agreeing to allow federal law enforcement to investigate alleged incidents of outspoken parents at school board meetings.
Garland, in a memo, agreed to responded to a Sept. 29 letter from the National School Board Association to President Biden asking that the FBI, Justice Department and other federal agencies to investigate potential acts of domestic terrorism at the meetings. Parents across the nation have been voicing their concerns about the curricula being taught to their children, in addition to instances like the one currently playing out in northern Virginia, in which there was an apparent coverup of the sexual assault of a female student in a bathroom.
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On Feb. 29, 2020, the U.S. and the Taliban signed the Doha Agreement, which set conditions for an American military withdrawal from Afghanistan. A few days later, then-President Donald Trump picked up the phone to call Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar. On that call, Trump explained to Baradar in no uncertain terms that, if he and his men didn’t fulfill the agreement, which included a pledge not to attack U.S. forces, the Taliban would suffer dearly. Not a single U.S. soldier was killed in combat in Afghanistan for the rest of Trump’s presidency.
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Before the 2018 midterm elections, Trump’s political advisors were thinking about the president’s re-election bid and noticed a curious commonality among incumbent presidents who didn’t get re-elected: they all faced challengers from within their own party.
Five U.S. presidents since 1900 have lost their bids for a second term. William Taft lost to Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover lost to Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton. While each election is determined by unique factors, all five of these failed incumbents dealt with internal party fights or serious primary challenges.
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A series of economic struggles that have grown increasingly worse this year will likely have a significant impact on the holiday season, many economic experts predict.
After President Joe Biden gave remarks from the White House this week, one reporter called out, “Will Christmas presents arrive on time, sir?” The president did not respond to that question or the flurry of others as he walked away from the podium.
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State Department evacuation flights out of Afghanistan will resume by the end of the year, a senior State Department official told The Wall Street Journal.
The operation to retrieve U.S. citizens and Afghan allies left behind will require coordination with the Taliban and other governments, the official told The Wall Street Journal. Kabul’s international airport remains closed to regular passenger travel since the U.S. ended its first evacuation attempt on Aug. 31.
U.S. citizens, U.S. legal permanent residents and immediate family members will receive priority treatment in securing seats on evacuation flights, the official said. The State Department is hoping to eventually have several aircraft leave the country each week.
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When 13 U.S. service members were killed by suicide bombers as American citizens were abandoned in Afghanistan last August—in perhaps the most ill planned military operation since our efforts in Somalia which resulted in naked U.S. servicemen being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu—it should have given us a clue about the Biden Administration’s priorities. Much as the Somalian disaster led to a massive influx of Somali immigrants, which is changing the makeup of the Midwest, we can soon expect a surge in Afghan immigration.
In retaliation for the Kabul airport bombings, the United States conducted a drone strike on what the world was told were ISIS-K members. When confronted about the irregularities of the operation, General Mark Milley described the air attack as a “righteous strike.” We later learned this “righteous strike” killed an innocent aid worker and nine members of his family. No one has been held accountable for this tragic political slaughter.
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What was the purpose for the insane opposition of the Left between 2017 and 2021? To usher in a planned nihilism, an incompetent chaos, a honed anarchy to wreck the country in less than a year?
No sooner had Donald Trump entered office than scores of House Democrats filed motions for impeachment, apparently for thought crimes that he might, some day, in theory, could possibly commit.
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The U.S. will provide humanitarian aid to Afghanistan but won’t recognize the Taliban as the country’s leaders, the Associated Press reported on Sunday.
U.S. and Taliban officials met for the first time since American forces left the county in August in Doha, Qatar, according to the Associated Press. U.S. officials said they would provide aid to Afghanistan, which faces an economic disaster, at the meeting’s conclusion.
U.S. officials said the leaders “discussed the United States’ provision of robust humanitarian assistance, directly to the Afghan people,” the AP reported. The aid was promised after officials agreed it didn’t mean the U.S. would officially recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan’s government.
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An Afghan father and ally to American military operations in the country sued the U.S. in an effort to reunite with his two sons who are in hiding in Afghanistan, the Associated Press reported on Thursday.
Mohammad decided to request asylum in the U.S. after the Taliban sent a death threat to his home in Afghanistan where his wife and two sons were in 2019, according to the AP. He petitioned for visas for his wife and children before she died of a heart attack in 2020, forcing his sons to go into hiding with their grandmother and uncle.
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Almost two months after the Taliban seized control of the nation of Afghanistan, dozens of American students and their relatives remain stuck in the nation that is now controlled by enemy forces, and with no more American military forces remaining, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The majority of the students are from the Sacramento area of California. The Times’ Justin Ray says that his investigations have led him to believe that there are still “dozens” of families still trapped in Afghanistan, with 38 students among them. The students are all from the San Juan Unified School District.
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Former President Donald Trump says he’s not concerned by the prospect of his former advisers testifying before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
Lawmakers, Trump argued, should instead investigate the “insurrection” that changed last year’s election rules and committee chairman Bennie Thompson’s ties to a black separatist group whose members killed cops decades ago.
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The Marine officer who received viral attention in August for posting a video on social media blasting military leadership over the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, has been thrown in the brig, the United States Marine Corps has confirmed.
Lt. Col Stuart Scheller was taken to a military brig on Monday for violating a gag order, his father told the military blog Task & Purpose.
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Top American military leaders are set for another round of intense congressional grilling on Wednesday, following a day-long Tuesday session that at times featured blistering criticism of their part in the U.S. exit from Afghanistan.
The Tuesday hearing placed on the griddle Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin; U.S. Central Command Chief Gen. Frank McKenzie; and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley.
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As we get to the midpoint between the last presidential election and next year’s midterms, all political sides are expending extraordinary effort to ignore the 900-pound gorilla in the formerly smoke-filled room of American politics. This, of course, is Donald Trump.
The Democrats are still outwardly pretending Trump has gone and that his support has evaporated. They also pretend they can hobble him with vexatious litigation and, if necessary, destroy him again by raising the Trump-hate media smear campaign back to ear-splitting levels.
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Mistakes like the ones that led to the deaths of 10 civilians by a U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan will continue without a ground presence, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Now that we don’t have an on-the-ground presence, it’s going to be harder to target people and know they’re the right people,” Mick Mulroy, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (DASD) for the Middle East and veteran of Afghanistan, told the DCNF.
Mulroy said the diminished U.S. human intelligence network in the country would severely impact the ability of the military to monitor terrorism. “We had an intelligence service. We had bases all over the country. We had the ability to move about, to meet with people. Now, we don’t have any of that,” he said.
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Twenty House Republicans signed a letter to President Joe Biden Thursday demanding a public account of the military equipment lost in Afghanistan and the risks that it poses to the U.S., its allies and its interests.
The letter, led by North Carolina Rep. Ted Budd and obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation, also laments the lack of public reports detailing how tax dollars were spent in the country throughout the two-decade war. Other signees included Reps. Brian Mast of Florida, Jody Hice of Georgia and Michelle Steel and Young Kim of California.
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Two Afghan refugees staying at Fort McCoy have been charged in separate incidents involving sexual assault of a minor and abuse. A grand jury charged Afghan refugees Bahrullah Noori and Mohammad Haroon Imaad on Thursday. Noori, 20, was charged with three counts of sexual assault of a minor, with one count of use of force. According to the indictment, the girls he assaulted at Fort McCoy “had not attained the age of 16 years and were at least four years younger than the defendant.”
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President Biden’s job-approval rating has fallen six percentage points, to 43%, since August. The number is the lowest of his roughly eight-month presidency, and now for the first time, a majority, 53%, disapproves of his performance, according to a Gallup poll released Wednesday.
The poll was conducted from Sept. 1 to 17, after the U.S. military left Afghanistan in late August. The military’s departure after 20 years in the country included the chaotic evacuation of 120,000 people that was overshadowed by a suicide bomber killing 13 U.S. service members.
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The United States should be at its pinnacle of strength. It still produces more goods and services than any other nation—China included, which has a population over four times as large. Its fuel and food industries are globally preeminent, as are its graduate science, computer, engineering, medical, and technology university programs. Its constitution is the oldest of current free nations. And the U.S. military is by far the best funded in the world. And yet something has gone terribly wrong within America, from the southern border to Afghanistan.
The inexplicable in Afghanistan—surrendering Bagram Air Base in the middle of the night, abandoning tens of billions of dollars of military equipment to the Taliban, and forsaking both trapped Americans and loyalist Afghans—has now become the new Biden model of inattention and incompetence.
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Twenty years after the U.S. government declared war on terrorism, it consummated its own defeat in Kabul and Washington, in a manner foreseeable, foreseen, and foreshadowed in 9/11’s immediate aftermath. Fixation on itself and unseriousness about war are the twin habits of heart and mind that disposed the ruling class to defeat. The practical explanation for why and how it accepted defeat is found in the overriding interest each part of the ruling class has in doing what it wants to do.
On the night of September 11, 2001, Muslim governments strictly forbade public celebrations of the carnage. The Palestinian Authority, anticipating that outraged Americans would destroy them to avenge the day’s events, even called the attacks al nachba—“the disaster.” But as the U.S. ruling class made clear that it was accepting defeat, the Muslim world’s media and streets celebrated.
Two decades later, after that defeat’s logic had worked its way through and transformed American life, and as the government’s self-humiliating exit from Afghanistan consummated it, much of mankind followed Muslim crowds in celebrating—including prominent Americans.
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When the Taliban assumed control of Afghanistan last month, the group took possession of a U.S.-funded weapons stockpile worth tens of billions of dollars.
The U.S. invested nearly $83 billion in bolstering the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), more than $24 billion of which went to funding weapons, vehicles and other equipment, according to a Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) report published in July. The amount of funding for weapons, vehicles and equipment is based on a 2017 Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimate that roughly 70% of the investment went towards other budget items like training.
In the aftermath of the shocking collapse of the Western-backed Afghan government last month, U.S. defense officials estimated that Taliban militants took dozens of aircraft including Blackhawk helicopters and thousands of vehicles, communications equipment and weapons. Republican lawmakers demanded the Biden administration provide them with a full accounting of the equipment that was in the Taliban’s possession while GOP members of the House Armed Services Committee introduced a bill requiring the White House to share the information with Congress.
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