The U.S. has been desperately trying to evacuate people out of the Kabul airport in Afghanistan.
There was such a large number of people and great need for planes that Joe Biden even ordered private airlines to provide planes to help with the process about a week ago.
The Pentagon has ordered U.S. commercial airlines to provide planes to help speed up Afghanistan evacuation efforts, it said Sunday.
The planes would not fly into Kabul but instead would be used to transport those who have already been flown out of the country to military bases or transit points in Europe and the Middle East. That would allow military aircraft to focus on operations in and out of the Afghan capital, the Pentagon said.
The Defense Department activated the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, a nearly 70-year-old program created in the wake of the Berlin airlift to provide a backup by commercial air carriers for a “major national defense emergency.” It is the third time the CRAF has been activated. Previously it was used in the early 1990s and early 2000s during the Iraq wars.
So every military plane was desperately needed to help with the evacuation.
But it turns out that one military jet was being used elsewhere, despite the national security emergency, by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who chartered it to go to a diplomatic summit in Ukraine, also last Monday.
“As President Biden recently said, we are in a ‘winter of peril,’ so it’s disconcerting to see administration officials essentially taking joy rides on military aircraft. It’s the definition of fraud, waste, and abuse,” said Tom Anderson, director of the National Legal and Policy Center’s Public Integrity Project.
The White House confirmed to the Free Beacon that Granholm used a military flight and defended it as “standard protocol” because Granholm was attending the event as a dignitary, representing the president. [….]
“Standard operating procedure does not apply during a national security crisis; these moments require judgment,” one former Trump administration official told the Free Beacon. “The fact that the White House chose to send a cabinet member overseas on a non-mission-essential visit, unnecessarily diverting State Department and DOD resources, is ludicrous, not to mention an abuse of taxpayer dollars.”
The official added that the military charters “require refueling and the support of personnel at military bases such as Ramstein Air Base, which is currently being used to transport and house thousands of people fleeing Afghanistan.”
This would have been wrong normally and worthy of investigation. But especially in the face of the emergency, Biden approved her use of this plane for a non-essential summit that she shouldn’t even be use a military jet to fly to to begin with.
Why? Why is he ordering the private airlines into service, when he’s doing stuff like this at the same time? There’s no possible justification for this ridiculous use of a military jet. So far, the Department of Energy refuses to answer up as to what the justification for all this was.
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