On Thursday’s White House press conference, the incompetent Karine Jean-Pierre once again used National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby as a crutch by letting him brief the members of the White House press corps for nearly the entire time. The topic of the day was the conveniently timed release of the Biden regime’s post-mortem on the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. The reporters in the room skewered Kirby on the report’s findings as well as the pre-holiday news dump. During what WMAL radio talk show host Vince Coglianese refers to as “the grownup press briefing,” Kirby struggled with the rare barbs from all sides.
First up was CBS’s Ed O’Keefe who was furious at what he called the “major holiday news dump.” “I think I speak on behalf of my colleagues in this room when we want the record to reflect that this was sent to us about 10 minutes before the briefing began with little notice,” O’Keefe fumed.
“So, why today? And is this all we get? And is this a response to the studies that were done by the agencies? Or is this considered a summary of them?” O’Keefe asked.
Kirby responded by claiming “This is the result of months and months of work by individual agencies who were participating in the withdrawal to voluntarily review that withdrawal, which they did.”
O’Keefe continued to drill down on Kirby. Click “expand” to read:
O’KEEFE: I got two specific ones about what’s in this document after a speed read here. On page eight: “The President received and accepted the unanimous advice of his top national security officials to end the evacuation on August 31st.” What is the definition of a “top national security official”? Because we know, for example, that General McKenzie, who was then head of CENTCOM, has said he objected to aspects of this. So what’s the definition of a top national security official?
KIRBY: I am loath to get into the individual advice that individual members of the President’s team give him. That would not be appropriate for me. But I can tell you, having lived through this as well at the Pentagon, that the President specifically asked his team: Should we extend past the 31st? He specifically asked them to go back and look and see what that would look like. Because we had secured this additional time from the Taliban to the 31st of August. And the team did that. The team did that, Ed, not just at the highest levels of the Pentagon, from the Secretary to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to General McKenzie, but even the operational commanders on the ground.
And there were numerous flag and general officers on the ground at the airport. All of them took a fair look at the President’s request and came back to him —
O’KEEFE: But are they all top national security officials?
KIRBY: — and said that it would not be advisable given the high-threat environment. Remember what also happened — on the 26th, that attack at Abbey Gate. And then we had very high temp between the 26th and the 30th, in which, of course, there was a kinetic strike taken in downtown Kabul. There was — there was high temp. And so, the advice of his senior national security team all the way up to the senior levels of the Pentagon advised him that the 31st was the appropriate date to end that evacuation.
O’KEEFE: There’s four pages here of blame on the previous administration or this White House explanation of what the last White House did regarding Afghanistan. Nowhere in here does there appear to be any expression of accountability or mistake by either the President himself or others? Is there any for what happened?
KIRBY: I would argue that the very fact that we voluntarily — the agencies voluntarily decided to go conduct after-action reviews — nobody told them to do that. That wasn’t legislated by Congress. They did that on their own. And the fact that they did that and that we’re now placing it in — in — on the Hill for Congress to look at; the fact that we digested and distilled some of the key points of that and gave it out in a public document; the fact that I’m up here talking to you about it, I think, shows you how seriously the President felt about learning lessons from this withdrawal.
I would also point out to you that the work isn’t over. So, number one, even before you got that document, some of those lessons were applied. I had talked about Ethiopia. I talked about Ukraine. And number two, it’s not like — it’s not like the work is all over. The President signed the legislation enabling the— the Afghan War Commission to be formed. And we’re going to continue to work and cooperate with that. That’s going to look at the whole 20 years. And America’s longest war deserves a lengthy review and lengthy study, and the President is committed to that. Thank you.
Later on, Real Clear Politics’ Phillip Wegmann noted that the “summer before the withdrawal, there was a dissent channel — cable that was written by 23 State Department officials there at the Kabul Embassy, warning that the administration, in their view, was not prepared at that moment for the withdrawal.”
He then politely asked, “Did this review take that dissent cable into account?”
Kirby refused to answer and instead referred Wegmann to the State Department.
Wegmann asked a follow-up on if “there was a moment during the Afghanistan withdrawal that the President lost confidence in the assessments that were given to him by the intelligence community.”
“The President knows how hard people work across the administration to try to give him the best information that they can,” Kirby responded with a non-answer answer.
"No one doubts that they weren’t working hard. But their assessment was flawed, and they failed in that assessment,” Wegmann shot back before asking “Has anyone been held accountable for giving the President a wrong view about how things were turning out on the ground?”
Next up was NBC’s Kristen Welker who surprisingly challenged Kirby. Her question was on whether Biden was willing to take any responsibility. “Does the President take responsibility for the withdrawal and everything that happened thereafter?”
Kirby’s response was that Biden is “the Commander-in-Chief.”
After Kirby continued to make excuses for how badly things went in Afghanistan, Welker cut him off and asked “He had eight months to plan. Did he not?”
Kirby’s reply was to blame Trump again by claiming Biden “had to take eight months to plan because we — whatever plans there might have been done by the previous administration, we didn’t see.”
Asking once again for some form of transparency, Welker inquired that “Given the enormity of this report, given the American lives that were lost, why are we not hearing directly from the President?”
“We are putting this forth for you and for Congress to- — today. And I think you’ve heard from the President. He has talked many times,” Kirby replied before Welker interjected: “But not about this report.”
Then came the moment everyone waits for at every press conference: Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy:
“Who’s going to get fired over this?,” Doocy demanded to know.
“The purpose of the document that we’re putting out today is to sort of collate the chief reviews and findings of the agencies that did after-action reviews,” Kirby responded in bureaucratic gibberish.
“Do you admit that the intel was bad? So how can President Biden ever trust, when they come into the Oval Office with the PDB, that anything in there is legit?” Doocy shot back.
“What I said was intelligence is hard business, and they get it right a lot too. There were some pieces here that weren’t accurate,” Kirby replied.
Then things got heated between Doocy and Kirby. Click “expand” to read the full exchange:
DOOCY: But it doesn’t seem like after the country has had a couple months to review this, and as the government has, people don’t have an issue with the decision to order troops out of Afghanistan. It is with the way that this President ordered it done. There were children being killed. There were people hanging off of Air Force jets that were leaving. And you’re saying that you guys are proud of the way that this mission was conducted?
KIRBY: It doesn’t mean —
DOOCY: You’re proud of that?
KIRBY: Proud of the fact that we got more than 124,000 people safely out of Afghanistan? You bet. Proud of the fact that American troops were able to seize control of a defunct airport and get it operational in 48 hours? You bet. Proud of the fact that we now have about 100,000 Afghans, our former allies and partners, living in this country and working towards citizenship? You bet. But does that mean that everything went perfect in that evacuation? Of course not.
I’ve talked about it from a dif- — a different podium. The after-action reviews are now being reviewed by members of Congress, which will lay out things that could have gone better. Nobody is saying that everything was perfect, but there was a lot that went right. And a lot of Afghans are now living better lives in this country and other countries around the world because of the sacrifices and the work of so many American government officials. So, yeah, there’s a lot to be proud of, Peter.
Next, it was James Rosen of NewsMax who got to tussle with Kirby. “We in this room hear you saying, and the American people hear you saying, that President Biden inherited bad policies from President Trump,” Rosen asked before getting cut off by Kirby.
“No. No, no, no. Bad outcomes, bad conditions on the ground. That’s what I said,” Kirby interrupted.
Rosen responded: “Well, you said he reduced the force to 2,500. You’re characterizing that as a bad policy, yes?”
“I’m characterizing that as a fact,” Kirby snarked.
Once Rosen was able to finish, he absolutely roasted Kirby and his never-ending excuses:
The depiction of the Commander-in-Chief that you present — or this Commander-in-Chief — is of a figure almost helpless and shaped and buffeted by individuals and forces and entities that are beyond his control when he had every option to increase the troop size there during his eight months in office, he had every option to intensify attacks on the 5,000 Taliban fighters, and so on. So what — I just don’t understand why you’re willing to depict your boss, the Commander-in-Chief, as so helpless in this instance.
“The President was anything but helpless,” Kirby proclaimed.
Finally, it was Steven Portnoy of CBS News Radio who simply asked “Why should the American people have confidence in all of those national security advisors, given what this report lays out?”
“The President does have trust and confidence in his national security team,” Kirby insisted.
To read the transcript of the April 6, 2023, White House press conference, click "expand":
White House Press Conference
4/6/2023
1:47:45 p.m. EasternED O’KEEFE: So, John, thank you for doing this. But I think I speak on behalf of my colleagues in this room when we want the record to reflect that this was sent to us about 10 minutes before the briefing began with little notice, and it’s the very definition of a modern major holiday news dump. You’re releasing this at the beginning of the High Holidays and after months of requests from Republicans and the broader public. So, why today? And is this all we get? And is this a response to the studies that were done by the agencies? Or is this considered a summary of them?
JOHN KIRBY: Yeah, there’s a lot there. This is the result of months and months of work by individual agencies who were participating in the withdrawal to voluntarily review that withdrawal, which they did. And they worked through that. These are — these documents are classified. And we felt it was the responsible thing to do, after those reviews were done, to then run a process across the administration to take a look at those reviews ourselves across the interagency, work our way through it, and then provide them to the relevant committees and leaders on the Hill, which we did today. We think that was the responsible thing to do.
And what you’re seeing today is the result and the culmination of an awful lot of work, Ed. No effort here to try to obfuscate or try to bury something. It’s an effort to try to be as open, as transparent as we can be. And what you’ve got in that document there is a pretty fair summary of our perspectives of the work over those many months, and pulling and collating a lot of those lessons learned together. And we’re trying to present certainly the key lessons learned — the ones that we’re — we’re able to share more openly and more publicly with you. And I’ll tell you this: You got questions after the briefing today — I’ll stay here as long as you want. But you got questions after the briefing today? You know how to get ahold of me. We’ll answer whatever you have.
O’KEEFE: I got two specific ones about what’s in this document after a speed read here. On page eight: “The President received and accepted the unanimous advice of his top national security officials to end the evacuation on August 31st.” What is the definition of a “top national security official”? Because we know, for example, that General McKenzie, who was then head of CENTCOM, has said he objected to aspects of this. So what’s the definition of a top national security official?
KIRBY: I am loath to get into the individual advice that individual members of the President’s team give him. That would not be appropriate for me. But I can tell you, having lived through this as well at the Pentagon, that the President specifically asked his team: Should we extend past the 31st? He specifically asked them to go back and look and see what that would look like. Because we had secured this additional time from the Taliban to the 31st of August. And the team did that. The team did that, Ed, not just at the highest levels of the Pentagon, from the Secretary to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to General McKenzie, but even the operational commanders on the ground.
And there were numerous flag and general officers on the ground at the airport. All of them took a fair look at the President’s request and came back to him —
O’KEEFE: But are they all top national security officials?
KIRBY: — and said that it would not be advisable given the high-threat environment. Remember what also happened — on the 26th, that attack at Abbey Gate. And then we had very high temp between the 26th and the 30th, in which, of course, there was a kinetic strike taken in downtown Kabul. There was — there was high temp. And so, the advice of his senior national security team all the way up to the senior levels of the Pentagon advised him that the 31st was the appropriate date to end that evacuation.
O’KEEFE: There’s four pages here of blame on the previous administration or this White House explanation of what the last White House did regarding Afghanistan. Nowhere in here does there appear to be any expression of accountability or mistake by either the President himself or others? Is there any for what happened?
KIRBY: I would argue that the very fact that we voluntarily — the agencies voluntarily decided to go conduct after-action reviews — nobody told them to do that. That wasn’t legislated by Congress. They did that on their own. And the fact that they did that and that we’re now placing it in — in — on the Hill for Congress to look at; the fact that we digested and distilled some of the key points of that and gave it out in a public document; the fact that I’m up here talking to you about it, I think, shows you how seriously the President felt about learning lessons from this withdrawal.
I would also point out to you that the work isn’t over. So, number one, even before you got that document, some of those lessons were applied. I had talked about Ethiopia. I talked about Ukraine. And number two, it’s not like — it’s not like the work is all over. The President signed the legislation enabling the— the Afghan War Commission to be formed. And we’re going to continue to work and cooperate with that. That’s going to look at the whole 20 years. And America’s longest war deserves a lengthy review and lengthy study, and the President is committed to that. Thank you.
[...]
PHILIP WEGMANN: That summer before the withdrawal, there was a dissent channel — cable that was written by 23 State Department officials there at the Kabul Embassy, warning that the administration, in their view, was not prepared at that moment for the withdrawal. I’m curious: Did this review take that dissent cable into account?
KIRBY: You’ll have to talk to the State Department. The State Department conducted an after-action review. That — and so did the DOD — and that’s a question better put to them.
WEGMANN: And then one specifically then for the President and this administration. I’m curious if there was a moment during the Afghanistan withdrawal that the President lost confidence in the assessments that were given to him by the intelligence community and lost confidence in the intelligence community itself, given that they failed to foresee how quickly the Taliban would advance and Kabul would fall.
KIRBY: The President knows how hard people work across the administration to try to give him the best information that they can. But it didn’t stop him from asking. Throughout the entire withdrawal, he was constantly pulsing the national security team about this or that assessment and constantly challenging the thinking, constantly looking for — for ways to better understand what was going on on the ground. Some of the assessments that was produced, as I put in my opening statement, were — proved out to be not correct. But — but, you know, he — again, this was, you know, an honest effort by everybody to try to get at the right outcome.
WEGMANN: No one doubts that they weren’t working hard. But their assessment was flawed, and they failed in that assessment. Has anyone been held accountable for giving the President a wrong view —
KIRBY: I don’t —
WEGMANN:— about how things were turning out on the ground?
KIRBY: I don’t know how much intelligence you read or you get to look at it every day, but let me tell you something: It’s a mosaic. It’s really hard. And I’ve yet to see an intelligence assessment that — that ever was 110 percent certain about something. They — they get paid to do the best they can, weaving in multiple sources of information, sometimes in real-time without even a lot of time to process. And do — and they do the best they can. Do they always get it right? They’ll be the first ones, if they were up here, to tell you they don’t always get it right.
And clearly, we didn’t get things right here with Afghanistan about how fast the Taliban were moving across the country. I don’t think we fully anticipated the degree to which they were constructing these deals in the hinterlands that kind of fell like dominoes. We didn’t anticipate how fast the Afghan National Security Forces were going to fold, were not going to fight for their country — particularly after we had, as I said, dedicated 20 years, trained and equipped them. I don’t think we fully appreciated the degree of corruption that was in the officer ranks in the military. I could go on and on and on. But it doesn’t mean that people weren’t trying and doing their best effort to understand that. But intelligence, getting it right every single time — man, that’s — that’s a tough — that’s a tough hill to climb.
KRISTEN WELKER: Karine, thank you. And, John, thank you for being here. It seems like page after page, this places the blame on the previous administration, starting with page one. “President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdraw from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor.”
KIRBY: Yeah.
WELKER: Let me just follow up with you on something that Ed was asking, which is: Does the President take responsibility for the withdrawal and everything that happened thereafter?
KIRBY: He’s the Commander-in-Chief. And he absolutely has responsibility for the operations that our men and women conduct and the orders that he gives. And he continues to believe that the order to withdraw from Afghanistan was the right one. And if you just look, Kristen, at what’s happened since we pulled out of Afghanistan and see what the United States military has been better able to do on behalf of the American people, I think there’s only one conclusion you can come to and that it was the right decision.
WELKER: And as you list these things that —
KIRBY: But — but wait — before I answer — but that do- — but you need to remember — and I get the question about, you know, the previous administration — you got to look at when he came into office what he was walking into. He didn’t negotiate with the Taliban. He didn’t invite the Taliban to Camp David. He didn’t release 5,000 prisoners. He didn’t reduce force levels in Afghanistan to 2,500. And he didn’t have an arrangement with the Taliban that they wouldn’t attack our troops. He came in with a certain set of circumstances he had no ability to change. He had to deal with it based on what he inherited.
WELKER: And yet, he had eight months to plan. Did he not?
KIRBY: He had to take eight months to plan because we — whatever plans there might have been done by the previous administration, we didn’t see. And — and it was not apparent that there was a lot of planning done. So, yes, he took some time to — to work through that. I don’t think he can be blamed for that. In fact, he enabled and was able to secure from the Taliban extra time on the clock. Because by May 1st, you might remember, they were going to come in guns blazing. Hang on a second. I’ll get to you.
They were going to come in guns blazing on May 1st. He got us until the end of August so that we could do — I mentioned that in my opening statement — proper planning, proper planning that — that accounted for high-risk scenarios and — and probabilities that we — we hadn’t thought of before so that he could get military forces pre-positioned in the region so that if we had to go in and conduct an evacuation, they could do that. And you know how fast they got there? Forty-eight hours. When we ordered a NEO — a noncombatant evacuation — because he put them there. And he had to have time to do that.
WELKER: What does the President believe — what mistakes does the President believe he made?
KIRBY: I’m not going to speak for the President on — on that score. What I can tell you is that, again, we’ve done a good-faith effort here to work through the lessons learned of this withdrawal. And we’ve already started to apply those lessons. The President ran a very inclusive, very rigorous, very flexible process that was responsive, as I said, to — to the views of operational commanders on the ground. He repeatedly asked for and received assessments almost every day about what was going on, and — and acted in accordance with the best judgment of his advisors, particularly military advisors, as things were unfolding.
WELKER: John, just finally, given the enormity of this report, given the American lives that were lost, why are we not hearing directly from the President?
KIRBY: We are putting this forth for you and for Congress to- — today. And I think you’ve heard from the President. He has talked many times —
WELKER: But not about this report.
KIRBY: — about — he has talked many times about his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, his belief that it was the right decision. He has talked publicly about the withdrawal before and about the courage and sacrifice and the professionalism. And he has been — he and the First Lady have been very open and honest and transparent about — about the sorro- — sorrow that they feel for — for those that lost their lives.
PETER DOOCY: Thanks. John, who’s going to get fired over this?
KIRBY: Peter, the purpose of the document that we’re putting out today is to sort of collate the chief reviews and findings of the agencies that did after-action reviews. The — it’s not — the purpose of it is not accountability. It’s — the purpose of it is —DOOCY: Military leaders were giving advice.
KIRBY: — purpose of it is —
DOOCY: It doesn’t sound like it was good.
KIRBY: — to study lessons learned.
DOOCY: Do you admit that the intel was bad? So how can President Biden ever trust, when they come into the Oval Office with the PDB, that anything in there is legit?
KIRBY: What I said was —
DOOCY: “That intelligence is a mosaic.” What if the mosaic — all the pieces are incorrect?
KIRBY: What I said was intelligence is hard business, and they get it right a lot too. There were some pieces here that weren’t accurate. And we’re being nothing but honest with you and the American people about what those inaccuracies were and how they shaped some of the decision-making that was laid before the President and his ques- — and the questions that he — that he asked. This document and this effort isn’t about accountability today. It’s about understanding. And I would also add that the re- — as I said to Ed — the review process isn’t over. This is — this is the next muscle movement in what will be a long process to better understand and comprehend and adjust to what we learned and what we did in Afghanistan.
DOOCY: But it doesn’t seem like after the country has had a couple months to review this, and as the government has, people don’t have an issue with the decision to order troops out of Afghanistan. It is with the way that this President ordered it done. There were children being killed. There were people hanging off of Air Force jets that were leaving. And you’re saying that you guys are proud of the way that this mission was conducted?
KIRBY: It doesn’t mean —
DOOCY: You’re proud of that?
KIRBY: Proud of the fact that we got more than 124,000 people safely out of Afghanistan? You bet. Proud of the fact that American troops were able to seize control of a defunct airport and get it operational in 48 hours? You bet. Proud of the fact that we now have about 100,000 Afghans, our former allies and partners, living in this country and working towards citizenship? You bet. But does that mean that everything went perfect in that evacuation? Of course not.
I’ve talked about it from a dif- — a different podium. The after-action reviews are now being reviewed by members of Congress, which will lay out things that could have gone better. Nobody is saying that everything was perfect, but there was a lot that went right. And a lot of Afghans are now living better lives in this country and other countries around the world because of the sacrifices and the work of so many American government officials. So, yeah, there’s a lot to be proud of, Peter.
[...]
JAMES ROSEN: Karine, thank you very much. Admiral, thank you. I have two questions about this report. First question is about the intelligence angle. I think we can safely agree that any time the assets of the intelligence community are harnessed to an assessment of a life-and-death matter and the community gets that wrong and death ensues, that that qualifies as an intelligence failure.
First question here is whether — since you have acknowledged essentially, without calling it as such, an intelligence failure in this case, do we know why the intelligence community got it wrong? What — was it cultural? Was it specific? Was it analytical? What was the problem with the intelligence community here?
KIRBY: The intelligence community also conducted after-action reviews, and I’d let them speak to that. I’m not going to do that from here.
ROSEN: Second question. We in this room hear you saying, and the American people hear you saying, that President Biden inherited bad policies from President Trump.
KIRBY: No. No, no, no. Bad outcomes, bad conditions on the ground. That’s what I said.
ROSEN: Well, you said he reduced the force to 2,500. You’re characterizing that as a bad policy, yes?
KIRBY: I’m characterizing that as a fact.
ROSEN: Okay. What we hear you saying — let me finish my question, please — and what the American people hear you saying is: President Biden inherited flawed policies from his predecessor, President Biden was deprived of the requisite transition papers he should have received from his predecessor, and President Biden was deprived of accurate information from President Ghani about his intentions, and President Biden was deprived of accurate assessments from the intelligence community.
The depiction of the Commander-in-Chief that you present — or this Commander-in-Chief — is of a figure almost helpless and shaped and buffeted by individuals and forces and entities that are beyond his control when he had every option to increase the troop size there during his eight months in office, he had every option to intensify attacks on the 5,000 Taliban fighters, and so on. So what — I just don’t understand why you’re willing to depict your boss, the Commander-in-Chief, as so helpless in this instance.
KIRBY: The President was anything but helpless. He drove a very — as I said, a deliberate and inclusive decision-making process. He was able to secure some extra time for us to be able to conduct a withdrawal and do so effectively.
He repeatedly, as I said in my opening statement, throughout the entire withdrawal, pulsed his national security team and senior military leaders about the conditions on the ground, asking tough questions, and getting answers and getting responses. And he acted on the best military judgment and the best assessments from the intelligence community as he could, as he made these decisions going forward. And some of those assessments turned out to be wrong, but it wasn’t for a lack of alacrity and energy and interest by the President in pulsing and questioning and analyzing all the way through. And this was — this was difficult.
As I said at the very end of my opening statement, ending a war — any war — is not an easy endeavor, certainly not after 20 years. And the President said himself there was no way in that process that it was going to be low grade, low cost, low risk. There was going to be risks. There were going to be costs. He knew that. The team knew that. And everybody tried the best they could to develop the best answers, the best responses, the best assessments that they could. The President relied on that judgment, but he kept challenging it. All the way through, he kept challenging it, he kept asking questions.
ROSEN: So given the conditions, your position is everything went about as well as it possibly could have?
KIRBY: My — it’s not my position, James. I would encourage you to take some time and look through the document, and you’ll see that some of the key lessons learned that we took away are that you got to — you got to really work hard at planning; you got to really work at interne- — inter-agency coordination; you got to — you got to be willing to — to revisit the idea of communications — crisis communications — with respect to evacuations, and maybe be willing to move sooner than what some of your instincts might be. I mean, there’s a lot in there. So I encourage you to take a look at that.
[...]
STEVEN PORTNOY: Yeah, thanks, John. Just sort of distilling some of the questions you’ve been asked about accountability — I appreciate the fact that lessons have been learned, and I assume that the President still has full confidence in his national security team that gave him the advice, which is pointed out in this summary. Why should the American people have confidence in all of those national security advisors, given what this report lays out?
KIRBY: The President does have trust and confidence in his national security team, and he did ask a lot of questions. And there was some assessments passed to him that — that proved faulty, that proved to be wrong, that proved to not shake out the way he had been given to understand that they would.
But in the aggregate, as he looks across all the work that the national security team continues to do, before and since the withdrawal from Afghanistan, he has — continues to conclude that this is an extraordinary — extraordinarily talented group of leaders.
And as — as — you know, as I said in my opening statement, as painful at times as the withdrawal was, it wasn’t without its moments of courage and poise. And it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t worth doing — ending that war in Afghanistan.
Because if you just take a look at — at what we’ve been able to do for Ukraine and how we’ve been able to really step up in a competition against China and deal with some of the tensions in the Indo-Pacific, it’s difficult to say that we would have been able to do all that we did over the last year or so without — if we were still dragged down on the ground in Afghanistan. In fact, Putin and Xi probably would like nothing better than for us to still be bogged down in a ground war in Afghanistan.
PORTNOY: Can I just —
KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: Go ahead, Andrew.
PORTNOY: Sorry, if I could just follow up. Kristen asked a question earlier. This report — this summary of your perspectives came out as the President was on his way to the Camp David retreat for the Easter weekend. When should we anticipate an opportunity for the President to stand for our questions about the findings in this document?
KIRBY: I don’t have anything on his schedule to speak to.
