Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar wasted no time slamming President Donald Trump for revealing he’d canceled a previously undisclosed meeting with Taliban leaders at Camp David where he’d reportedly planned to engage in peace talks.
Following the president’s tweet over the weekend, where he claimed he’d nixed the secret meeting after a Taliban attack killed an American service member, Klobuchar criticized Trump for meeting with terrorists in secret and accusing the president of treating foreign policy like “some kind of game show.”
"It is another example of the president treating foreign policy like some kind of game show. It's not a game show, these are terrorists," Klobuchar said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union” with Jake Tapper.
While Klobuchar added she thinks the president should be engaged in peace talks with the Taliban, the Minnesota lawmaker added she had a problem with the meeting being held without anyone's knowledge, calling it a "hastily arranged summit which no one knew was happening." On top of that, she then criticized the administration for continuing negotiations even after the meeting was reportedly canceled.
"He didn't even seem to have an agreement or close to an agreement when he set the summit. Then the excuse that's used to end the summit and take it down is the fact that tragically an American service member died as well as other civilians. Then they keep negotiating after that happened, so the whole thing doesn't quite make sense," she said.
There’s just one problem: President Obama had also attempted to hold a similar meeting with the Taliban – also in secret– back in 2012, a move met by deafening silence from many on the left. Like Trump's scheduled summit, that meeting, which was set to include discussions about a potential prisoner exchange of several Taliban members from Guantanamo Bay, was ultimately scrapped; however, negotiations were later resumed and, in 2014, the Obama administration secretly and unilaterally released five terrorists from Gitmo in exchange for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who’d been accused of deserting his unit before being captured by Taliban forces in Afghanistan in 2009.