OSHKOSH — On Thursday, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) joined Fox Business’ “Mornings with Maria” to discuss the Biden administration’s failed withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The full interview can be found here, and excerpts are below.
On Biden’s failure in Afghanistan:
“When you have President Biden almost taking a victory lap and calling the withdrawal an extraordinary success, you understand that he is detached from reality, and so it calls into question everything else the administration is telling you. What I can tell you is that over the course of last week or so, during that evacuation, there were so many people involved in it that were so alarmed what they were seeing. On the ground at the Kabul airport, where you had literally tens of thousands of people that somehow got in, we don’t know who they were, a very low percentage of the people being evacuated were either U.S. citizens or special immigrant visa holders, so people really didn’t know who were boarding those planes. We heard reports that many of them had no form of ID whatsoever. When I went to Fort McCoy, it’s one of the intake facilities, I asked the commanding general when did you first hear this was going to be your mission? He said 10 days ago. I further asked him, how many people — at that time they had about 1,000 refugees — how many of those individuals do you know for sure have an ID? Does everybody have at least some form of ID? He couldn’t say that was the case. Now if this was so thoroughly vetted, you would have a manifest, you would have people’s names on it and know exactly what type of visa they were holding, what type of status they had, but what concerns me is that Secretary Mayorkas through his authority is granting individuals two-year parolee status. That’s kind of an odd term but it provides a legal right to be in this country, and other certain legal rights as well. It’s an immigration benefit. I don’t know on what basis they are doing that with everybody landing here. So again I’m sorry I just don’t trust this administration. You see the crisis on the border, I don’t trust them to manage this process properly.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear from this administration. For example, the head of Northern Command was telling me he was assured by General Austin that all these individuals had been biometrically screened. So that’s good but if you are an ISIS terrorist, do you have you biometric information in one of our databases we are comparing it against? Again, what I ask for is that’s great, I hope that is the case, but I need to understand step-by-step exactly how they are being screened, exactly what that is being compared against, exactly what criteria they are using before they release anybody into the general population. I also have to say, bringing those individuals that did help our service members is something important that we need to do as a nation. Former Afghanistan veterans are passionate, they made guarantees to those individuals. We as a nation made the commitments to those people too. So, I am not saying don’t bring in people that helped us. I am just saying because of the chaos, because of the incompetence of this administration, we need to be extra careful with a everybody that we do let in this country.”
On Biden’s reckless policies:
“We’ve seen the first six months of this administration has been one rolling disaster after the other — the border crisis, which, of course, the press isn’t adequately covering, not even close, they’re going to cover up for this president. The out-of-control deficit spending, the creation of new entitlements. I heard the point that people aren’t coming into the workforce, they’re getting used to not working. Even when you reduce the unemployment benefits, my concern is there are so many other welfare benefits that are providing people enough income they they’re just staying out of the workforce — potentially permanently. This is not good for a vibrant economy.”
