Trump had delegated planning of the evacuation withdrawal to the Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau, a subdepartment within the State Department. Sometime between February and June this year (reports vary) Biden de-funded and abolished this department. Whatever plans they made were probably shredded, or perhaps are still in a filing cabinet somewhere but noone knows where.
Too bad it's
A State Department spokesperson said it "is important to note that not only would the proposed Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau not have introduced any new capabilities to the Department, it was never formally established,"
Fox News pushes false story that Biden “dismantled” an agency to evacuate Americans
Right-wing media are also attempting to credit Trump — as well as current Fox News contributor Mike Pompeo — for a State Department program first established under Obama
WRITTEN BY
ERIC KLEEFELD
Right-wing media, are pushing a story that the Biden administration shut down a Trump-era program to protect Americans such as those now trapped overseas in Afghanistan. But the network doesn’t seem to have checked whether this program actually existed in any real form. And moreover, the State Department’s capabilities to coordinate evacuations already existed — including a program that was initially set up under President Barack Obama, but which right-wing media are now attempting to attribute solely to President Donald Trump.
Fox ran an article online
Wednesday night, with the seemingly damning headline “Biden admin moved to dismantle protections for citizens trapped overseas months before Kabul’s fall: memo.” The article referred to a State Department memo in June for the “discontinuation of the establishment, and the termination of, the Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau (CCR).” The article said that this bureau was “formed under Trump-era Secretary of State Mike Pompeo” — who is also a
Fox News contributor and a
possible presidential candidate.
Of course, the fact that the memo discontinued the “establishment” of an agency ought to have called into question whether the agency had actually been “formed” yet.
The article was
updated a few hours later, inserting at the sixth paragraph a comment from a State Department spokesperson, explaining that the State Department already had all the capabilities that this agency supposedly would have provided.
A State Department spokesperson told Fox News in a Wednesday email that it “is important to note that not only would the proposed Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau not have introduced any new capabilities to the Department, it was never formally established.”
“Some administrative steps were taken before its establishment was paused, but the day-to-day operations of the team have not changed,” the spokesperson said.
“Every requirement the Department delivered on last year, and since the proposed establishment of the bureau, can be delivered on today in the same manner if appropriate to do so,” they continued.
One of the earliest mentions of this supposed agency having been abolished came during an appearance on Fox Business
Cavuto: Coast to Coast, during an interview with Robert Charles, a former State Department official during the George W. Bush administration.
