In his second State of the Union address Tuesday evening, President Biden made sure to skip over the fallout from the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, as well as the classified documents scandal in which he’s currently embroiled.
“President Biden has apparently forgotten about Afghanistan, but I can assure you the world has not,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., tweeted after Biden’s speech.
“Our allies are still shaken by his disastrous withdrawal and our terrorist enemies have been emboldened. Not one word about Afghanistan,” he wrote.
Hundreds of Americans were evacuated from Afghanistan after the U.S. military’s withdrawal on August 2021 and tens of thousands of Afghans who worked for the U.S. are still stranded in the Taliban-torn country, despite Biden’s promise to keep boots on the ground until we “get them all out.”
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After the withdrawal was completed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee there were only 100 Americans citizens left in Afghanistan who wanted to leave. The State Department revealed a year later, however, that more than 800 American citizens and at least 600 legal permanent residents of the U.S. were evacuated post-withdrawal.
Biden declining to mention the evacuation and relocation effort is not surprising. He didn’t mention it in his first address either, which the White House later attributed to a lack of time.
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And while Biden is currently under federal investigation for his handling of classified documents, he made no mention of it Tuesday night.
The FBI has conducted searches of two of Biden’s Delaware residences after classified documents dating back to the Obama administration and Biden’s time in the Senate were found in several unsecured areas.
The Brookings Institution, a center-left think tank, recommended in an article last week that Biden should essentially ignore the controversy in his State of the Union address, or take what it called “the Clinton approach.”