***To read the full blog, please check out the complete post on NewsBusters***
If a news outlet got a Republican administration to hint they didn’t plan to ensure every American got out of a collapsed country run by terrorists safely, it would be the headline of the day. But that wasn’t the case for CBS Evening News on Tuesday after White House correspondent Weijia Jiang grilled national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Press Secretary Jen Psaki on the issue; where they proved to be noncommittal on the idea that the administration would get every American out of Afghanistan safely.
CBS did approach the collapse of Afghanistan with a critical tone as Jiang spoke on how reports from the intelligence community about the situation seemed to be ignored by the White House:
Tonight CBS News has learned that classified intelligence assessments painted an increasingly grim picture of the situation on the ground. And as recently as July, they assessed that the Taliban could capture the capital, Kabul, within weeks. But, of course, that raises the question: why then, around the exact same time was President Biden publicly insisting it was highly unlikely that the Taliban could overrun the country?
But that could be addressed later. The biggest concern in the moment was getting ALL Americans out of Afghanistan as quickly and as safely as possible. And it was Jiang who got the press pool buzzing around the question.
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