Morning Wire - Afghanistan Evacuation Report & NPR’s Twitter Label | 4.7.23

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

The current administration releases a report summarizing the Afghanistan evacuation in which they put much of the blame on Former President Trump, Taxpayer-funded NPR is labeled as “state-affiliated media” by Twitter, and a former federal prosecutor weighs in on the indictment against Trump. Get the facts first with Morning Wire. Black Rifle Coffee: Get 10% off your first order or Coffee Club subscription with code WIRE: https://www.blackriflecoffee.com/ Nefarious Movie: NEFARIOUS opens in theaters nationwide starting April 14th. Buy your tickets today at http://www.whoisNefarious.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Black Rifle Coffee. Start your morning with America's Coffee from black rifle coffee.com. The Biden administration has released a new report on the chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan that left 13 service members dead and put most of the blame on President Trump. Who's going to get fired over this? The purpose of the document that we're putting out today is not accountability. We break down the details of the report. I'm Daily Wire, editor-in-chief John Bickley, with Georgia House.

It's Friday, April 7th, and this is Morning Wire. There's no doubt of the independence of NPR's journalists. Taxpayer-funded NPR has been labeled state-affiliated media by Twitter, just days after the struggling network announced massive layoffs. What's behind NPR's decline in how are insiders reacting? And a former federal prosecutor weighs in on the now unsealed indictment against Trump. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.

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The White House released a 12-page summary on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan on Thursday. The report characterized one of the darkest events of President Joe Biden's time in office as being largely the fault of former President Donald Trump. Daily Wire reporter Tim Pierce is here to break down the report. So, Tim, how is President Trump to blame for what went down in Afghanistan? Hey, Georgia, the summary is of an investigation into one of the Biden administration's worst moments. but it spends four of its 12 pages saying Trump set Biden up for failure in Afghanistan. It says that Trump's negotiations with the Taliban and the Doha agreement in which the U.S. agreed to withdraw left Biden in a tough spot with no good choices.

The summary suggests Biden's choices were either withdraw on a rush timeline or surge resources back into Afghanistan to fight a likely violent Taliban response. Now, what about the actual execution of the operation? What did they say about that? Yeah, what the report doesn't be. blame on Trump. It questions whether anyone could have done better. Here's what National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Thursday about that. No agency predicted a Taliban takeover in nine days. No agency predicted the rapid fleeing of President Ghani, who had indicated to us his intent to remain

in Afghanistan up until he departed on the 15th of August. And no agency predicted that the more than 300,000 trained and equipped Afghan national security and defense forces would fail to thwart. fight for their country. Maybe the worst single day of the pullout happened days before the final plane left. 13 U.S. service members and 170 Afghans died in a terror attack on the Abbey Gate at the Hamid Karzai International Airport. Here's Kirby on that. The president at the time made it clear to operational commanders that force protection remained his highest priority. In those tense days, when the threat was particularly high, he accepted the recommendation of his national security team to extend the timeline for evacuations only after his senior military officials confirmed

that they had sufficient resources and authorities to mitigate threats, including those threats posed by ISIS-K. Of course, Marine Sergeant Tyler Vargas Andrews, one of dozens of troops injured at the Abbey Gate, gave a very different perspective on the attack at a congressional hearing last month. No one wanted my report post-blast. Even NCIS and the FBI fell to interview me. The withdrawal was a catastrophe, in my opinion. and there was an inexcusable lack of accountability and negligence.

The U.S. withdrawal ended while hundreds of Americans and thousands of Afghan allies were still in Afghanistan trying to get out. The report, though, focused on what the Biden administration accomplished with a State Department workforce that had been cut under Trump. Now, having had plenty of time now to look back on how things have played out since the withdrawal, what does the report say about the fallout from Afghanistan? Yeah, there's certainly been fallout. But withdrawal cost us some of Saudi Arabia's confidence and pushed it closer to China. And the disaster also played a part in how Russia estimated the West would react before it invaded Ukraine.

The report attempted to put a positive spin on the failed withdrawal, though, for example, claiming that the U.S. is now on safer and stronger footing because of the withdrawal and the important lessons learned from it. They also claim that leaving Afghanistan freed up American resources to respond to terror threats and other parts of the globe, as well as better concentrate on helping Ukraine fight off. the Russian invasion. It's also worth noting the report was dropped at the end of the day before a holiday weekend, which didn't go unnoticed by reporters. Here's CBS's Ed O'Keefe questioning Kirby. 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? You can hear the frustration there. Tim, thanks for reporting. Thanks for having me. That was Daily Wires, Tim Pierce. controversy at NPR amid mass layoffs.

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Conversation and chaos ensues. Hollywood doesn't want you to see this film, an intelligent, suspenseful thriller made by Christians. But I'm telling you, you don't want to miss out. Nefarious opens in theaters nationwide starting April 14th. Buy your tickets today at who is nefarious.com. This week, Twitter applied a state-affiliated media label to the account of national public radio.

The state media warning label has typically been used for accounts such as Russia Today and China's Shinwa News Network. And NPR and its supporters are not taking kindly to the comparison. The move comes as the publicly funded news source has been forced to lay off about 10% of its employees. Here to discuss is Daily Wire contributor David Marcus. Hey, Dave. So Elon Musk has weighed in saying that the state media label seems accurate to him. What is the controversy here?

So Musk was citing part of the Twitter rules about state-affiliated media, which defines it as, quote, outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political. and or control over production and distribution, end quote. And the controversy is really about the editorial content part. It's clear that state-operated outlets in Russia and China do not have editorial independence. NPR says that it does, and that therefore the label is being misapplied. Now, NPR does get about 8% of its operating budget directly from the federal government that's through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Why wouldn't that be a state affiliation. I mean, it's actually much more money when you consider that tax deductible, corporate and private donations, decreased tax revenue. But their argument is that these federal

dollars, which go all the way back to 1967, are meant to allow them to operate outside the constraints of the marketplace and to focus solely on the public interests. Critics of MPR point out that its definition of the public interest often reads like a Democrat Party press release. And they decry the fact that all Americans are financially supporting the biased, soft-spoken political soundtrack of suburban volvos and college campuses. But importantly, there really are no specific allegations suggesting the government is engaged in direct editorial interference. Some current and former NPR employees have claimed that they're being targeted by Twitter leadership, specifically Musk, for their political coverage. Does this echo similar concerns that conservatives had prior to must take over? Yeah, the censorious shoe is on the other foot now, or so it seems.

And I think those on the right must be forgiven a moment or two to chuckle at the irony of it all. But that having been said, Musk's policies in this regard have been a bit capricious. He very publicly took away the checkmark for the New York Times when it refused to pay for Twitter, even though other non-paying accounts have retained their legacy blue checks. But look, as those on the left were. fond of saying for years and years, Twitter is a private company, and it can do what it wants. Yeah. Lastly, the radio network has announced it's cutting 10% of its workforce amid ad revenue declines, and there have been some allegations of racism in the firings. How bad are things right now

for NPR? Firing 10% of your workforce isn't ever seen as a sign of strength. I mean, as to the charges of racism, they stem from the fact that some of the cuts impact programming about race created by producers of color. This is a bit of a perfect storm, and NPR leadership certainly doesn't need this Twitter dustup in the midst of these layoffs. Well, David, thank you for reporting. Thanks for having me.

That was Daily Wire contributor, David Marcus. The charges against former President Donald Trump were unsealed on Tuesday, and Trump's legal team has called for them to be tossed out. The case isn't officially set to recommence for another eight months. Here to provide legal analysis of the charges against Trump and what to expect next is former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy. Hi, Andy. So we have 34 felony charges against Trump all related to the Stormy Daniels hush money payments.

What do you make of these charges from Alvin Bragg? Well, I don't think they state a crime. There's 34 counts, but the indictment fails as an indictment because under black letter criminal law principles, the purpose of an indictment is to put the defendant on notice. of what crime is charged. Without giving that information, the indictment is insufficient on its face. It's also indicative of a pretty serious grand jury violation because the prosecutor is the grand jury's legal advisor in the grand jury proceedings. The purpose of the grand jury is to make sure that the prosecution has enough of a case to go to trial. So the standard is the grand jury has to find

probable cause of every element of the offense charged. It's not a high standard. Probable cause is a low standard, which is why people say a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich. This is like a ham sandwich without the ham, though. And the reason for that, I think, is that we have to conclude that the district attorney failed to instruct the grand jury about what crime it was finding that Trump tried to conceal. And unless they found that there was probable cause of some crime he tried to conceal, then this violates the Fifth Amendment guarantee of an indictment by a grand jury. Now, Trump's legal team is really confident that this could just be thrown out and even quickly. Do you agree this case should just be dismissed?

I do. I think that it should get thrown out on the face of it because the indictment fails to state a crime before they even get to other pretty profound legal objections they have, which involved the statute of limitations, to the extent that this indictment lays out a crime at all. The only thing stated in the indictment are the elements of the misdemeanor charge in New York of falsifying business records. That only has a two-year statute of limitations. So by the face of the indictment, where the action ends on December 5th of 2017, this was time barred probably by 2019, but in no event. later than 2020. So they have a statute of limitations issue. The other thing is when Bragg was meandering at

his press conference about what the other crime might be, which he insisted he didn't have to say, which was among the more bizarre things I've ever seen a prosecutor argue. Indictment doesn't specify because the law does not so require. I further indicated a number of unlawful means, including more additional false statements, including statements that were planned to be made to tax authorities. I also noted the federal election law cap on contribution limits. He seemed to suggest that the crime that he was saying Trump concealed was either a violation of the federal campaign finance laws or a violation of the state campaign finance laws. I think the reason that Bragg is being coy and cryptic about this is because he knows

he does not have jurisdiction to enforce the federal law. as a state prosecutor. And he also knows that the state election laws do not apply to an election for federal office, specifically the presidency here. So I think it's not that he's dumb and he doesn't realize that this is problematic. It's that he doesn't want to flag how problematic it is because he doesn't have a case. If the judge agrees this case could be dismissed quickly, what is the process? What should we expect in the coming days and weeks? Well, for the moment, they're not even supposed to be back in court until December, right, eight months from now. If I were they, I would be under the judge's toes immediately saying, you know, look, you need to dismiss this

because on its face it doesn't state a crime. And this is very important to the country because we have an important federal election coming up and this is going to hang over it. And it shouldn't be allowed to hang over it unless the district attorney can show that he's got a serious crime that he has convincing evidence on. And there's no reason based on the four corners of what we have in front of us to believe that either one of those things is true. Well, we'll see whether the judge chooses to let this play out until December or takes action sooner. Andy, thanks for joining us.

My pleasure. That was former federal prosecutor, Annie McCarthy. That's all the time we've got this morning. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back later this afternoon with more news you need to know.