White House chief of staff forgets Obama caught bin Laden

Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, falsely claimed on Wednesday that Donald Trump is the only president who has ever taken out a terrorist.

In an interview on Fox News, Meadows dismissed criticisms of Trump’s poor international leadership made by former Secretary of State John Kerry in his speech on Tuesday at the Democratic National Convention, during which he called Trump’s foreign policy actions a “blooper reel.”

“This is the only president who actually went after a terrorist and took him out. How do we know that? We saw in real time, where this president took on a threat. And Iran is the state sponsor, the preeminent state sponsor of terror. And yet John Kerry is supposedly gonna applaud the efforts of the Obama administration?” Meadows said.

But the Obama-Biden administration also notably “went after a terrorist and took him out.”

In 2011, President Barack Obama sent SEAL Team 6 into Abbottabad, Pakistan, on an ultimately successful mission to capture and kill al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, the man behind the terrorist attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

The Obama administration did not release video footage of the raid.

The Trump administration carried out a mission in Syria targeting Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State group, in October 2019. It quickly released footage of the attack after it was completed.

NBC News reported then that military officials cringed as Trump revealed highly classified details of the tactics used in the raid. “He has no filter,” one former senior White House official said. “But also if he knows something, and he thinks it’s going to be good to say or make him appear smarter or stronger, he’ll just blurt it out.”

And while Meadows apparently gives Trump full credit for that raid, Trump has repeatedly suggested Obama deserved little praise for getting bin Laden.

“Obama deserves much less credit for the killing of Bin Laden. The praise goes to our brave military and intelligence officers,” he tweeted in October 2012.

“Why don’t we ask the Navy SEALs who killed Bin Laden?” Trump tweeted later that same month. “They don’t seem to be happy with Obama claiming credit. All he did is say O.K.”

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.