Former CIA Analyst Matt Zeller Calls on Biden to ‘Stop Gaslighting the Country’ Amid Evacuations in Afghanistan

Former CIA analyst Matt Zeller, who went viral last week in calling out Joe Biden’s Aug. 16 speech on Afghanistan, slammed the president on Tuesday for “gaslighting” the United States amid the evacuations of Americans and Afghan allies from Kabul, where CIA Director William Burns reportedly met with Taliban co-founder Abdul Ghani Baradar on Monday.

On MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle Reports Tuesday, host Chris Jansing — filling in for Ruhle — asked Zeller for his reaction to Burns’s reported meeting with Baradar and whether that gave him “any hope.”

Zeller said that it’s a “weird time to be in” given that Baradar was released from prison in 2018, “but that’s just how an end of a war that you lose goes.”

He went on to say that hopefully there’s a deal being made between the United States and the Taliban.

“It’s very clear that the devil’s arithmetic doesn’t have us being able to evacuate not just even all our Afghans but all of the Americans by the 31st of August,” said Zeller, referring to the U.S. timeline for completing the withdrawal from Afghanistan following almost 20 years of war there shortly after 9/11.

“The Association of Wartime Allies puts out a daily tracker and we haven’t updated it yet for today, but as of yesterday, we were going to take until at least September the 21st to complete the evacuation at the current pace of withdrawal,” he said. “We want to able to take everybody. We don’t want to leave a single person behind.”

Zeller went on to say that “the fact that we’re now sending director of Central Intelligence Agency to make a deal with the Taliban shows that the Biden administration hopefully finally understands that they’re going to be judged by one number and one number alone for the rest of history, and that’s how many people did we leave behind. Not how many people did we save, but how many people did we leave behind. Because let’s be clear, the president has got to stop gaslighting the country. We could have done this in a very orderly fashion. A plan existed all along.”

Zeller state that the non-partisan group he represents tried to give its plan to the Biden administration “as early as February” and “had they listened to us we wouldn’t have been in this situation.” Zeller also blamed the Trump administration for halting the Special Immigrant Visa program that rewards foreign nationals who helped U.S. forces in Afghanistan or Iraq, although that assertion is false. The Trump administration paused in-person interviews for the SIV program at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in March 2020 due to concerns over the coronavirus pandemic. The in-person interviews resumed during the second week of Biden’s presidency.

“There’s a lot of blame to go around on both sides of the aisle and with leadership,” said Zeller. “But what we now need to focus is the president has to keep this beachhead open. I mean, these people are right there. They’re at the gates. We can take them. We just need a little bit more time.”

Approximately 21,600 people were evacuated from the airport in Kabul in the past 24 hours, according to the White House.

Watch above, via MSNBC.

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