• During America’s chaotic exit from Afghanistan earlier this year, the Biden administration issued a directive that evacuation flights be filled to “excess” with refugees who had not been properly vetted before arriving in America, according to an internal administration communication disclosed on Tuesday by Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.).
• Hawley, who says he obtained the email through a U.S. official who was outraged by the Biden administration’s failure to vet Afghan refugees flown into America, published the email Tuesday afternoon on Twitter. Hawley maintains that Afghan evacuees were not throughly screened with intensive interviews before they arrived in the United States.
• The email, which has the subject line “presidential directive,” provides some of the firmest proof to date that the Biden administration decided to forgo proper vetting procedures in its rush to evacuate scores of Afghans following the Taliban’s takeover just weeks after the U.S. military retreated from the country.
• “We now know that we’ve got major problems of vetting of the people who were brought to this country, who were evacuated and brought to this country,” Hawley said. …”116,700 people who were not citizens, who were not SIVs, and we just don’t know much about who were those people?”

(Excerpt from Free Beacon. Picture Credit: Getty Images.)

The Pentagon stated Tuesday that nearly 450 American citizens are still in Afghanistan following August’s U.S. military withdrawal, more than the Biden administration has previously claimed.

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The latest tally came from Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl, after Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., pointed to what he believed were contradictory or at least “confusing” numbers that the administration has presented since the August 31 withdrawal.

“One of the many confusing things about this whole thing is that we really don’t know how many Americans are left in Afghanistan,” Inhofe said. “The administration’s number of U.S. citizens left in Afghanistan keeps changing. We all understand that. It’s very confusing.”

Inhofe noted that the Biden administration “always said 100 to 200 U.S. citizens left in Afghanistan,” but now says it “has already withdrawn 234 and is in contact with 363 others, 176 of whom want to leave,” citing numbers the State Department provided last week.

(Excerpt from Fox News.)