NatSec Advisor Jake Sullivan Dismisses Blowback Over Mad Scramble Out of Embassy: Helicopters are Common ‘Mode of Transport’

Shortly into his interview with Savannah Guthrie on the Today show Monday, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan was confronted with the July 8 comments of President Joe Biden.

“There’s gonna be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a (sic) embassy of the United States from Afghanistan,” Biden said.

“And yet that is precisely what we have seen over these last few days,” Guthrie said, after Biden’s comments played. “How do you explain getting this so wrong?”

Sullivan tried to spin the mad rush out of Kabul as a common occurrence.

“To be fair, the helicopter has been the mode of transport from our embassy to the airport for the last 20 years,” Sullivan said.

Guthrie wasn’t buying it.

“It’s not a helicopter,” she said, interjecting. “It’s not the mechanism. It’s the last-minute scramble, you know that. It’s the last-minute scramble when the assurances from the president himself were, this was not what we were going to see.”

“It is certainly the case that the speed with which cities fell was much greater than anyone anticipated,” Sullivan conceded. “Including the Afghans, including many of the analysts who looked hard at this problem. And part of the reason for that, savannah, is because at the end of the day, despite the fact that we spent 20 years and tens of billions of dollars to get the best equipment, the best training, and the best capacity to the Afghan national security forces, we could not give them the will. And they ultimately decided that they would not fight for Kabul, and they would not fight for the country.”

The NBC anchor was hardly sated by Sullivan’s reply.

“I guess the question is why, though, did the administration not know that?” Guthrie pressed.

“What the president kept saying over and over again was that it was not inevitable that Kabul would fall,” Sullivan said. “And it was not inevitable. There was that capacity to stand up and resist. That capacity didn’t happen.”

Guthrie went on to ask if what is playing out right now represents a “worst-case scenario.”

“It is heartbreaking to see what’s happening in Kabul,” Sullivan said. “But the president had to make the best possible choice he could, and he stands by that decision.

Watch above, via NBC.