Congressman Markwayne Mullin has gone missing from Afghanistan during a “rogue evacuation mission” to bring people home left abandoned by the Biden administration.
Or has he?
The Washington Post reported today that Mullin (R-Okla.) had called the U.S. ambassador in neighboring Tajikistan on Monday, saying he needed official help “in transporting a huge amount of cash” into Afghanistan as part of his effort to bring home an unnamed woman and her four children.
The Post also says that “Mullin’s behavior has alarmed top U.S. officials” for going to “extraordinary lengths to defy U.S. warnings.”
“Embassy officials,” reports the Post, “told Mullin they could not assist him in skirting Tajikistan’s laws on cash limits on his way to visiting one of the most dangerous places on earth.”
Just three weeks ago, no such warnings were necessary; traveling into and out of Kabul or Bagram was not particularly dangerous nor difficult, and one did not require “a huge amount of cash” to fly five people out unless you wanted business class.
These are facts the Post neglected to mention about Biden’s Bungled Bugout.
Whatever Mullin’s threats might have been, there aren’t even any secondhand accounts of what he supposedly said. The story only says that unnamed persons claim that Mullin threatened Ambassador John Mark Pommersheim and demanded to know the name of the people he’d been speaking with.
The Post’s story seemed to lament Mullin’s creation of a “sensitive situation” in entering a “perilous security environment” to “defy U.S. warnings” just like a previous “public relations stunt” that “sapped government resources” during a crisis.
Bonus: There’s even an implicit chickenhawk reference.
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I feel confident in characterizing the Post’s story the way I did because all of those quoted scare phrases in the previous paragraph come directly from it.
But you have to get halfway through the story — and past all the scare phrases — to get to the part where Mullin was posting on Instagram Wednesday morning, hours after he’d been feared missing.
Here’s his latest Instagram post:
View this post on Instagram
The caption reads:
I am heading home… Have we been helping get Americans out of Afghanistan, yes. Is the mission continuing, yes. Am I missing, no. Did I go dark for a little, yes because it wasn’t safe to be communicating. Am I extremely disappointed in how we (United States) left Americans behind… that would be an understatement. President Biden and his administration are absolutely lying to the American people about Americans and our friends being left behind.
There’s more at the link, and Mullin includes the hashtag #Ordinarypeopledoingextraordinarythings, which seems appropriate.
If, as it appears from Instagram, Mullin is safe and has successfully rescued a woman and four children from the tender mercies of the Taliban and/or ISIS-K, that would seem to be the real story.
Instead, the Washington Post went with the “congressman threatened embassy staff” (who probably could use a good rattling) before going missing on his latest fool’s errand.
Worse, other news outlets — including the conservative-leaning New York Post, Breaking911, and Gateway Pundit — mostly followed the Post’s lead.
That’s how narratives get established, and that’s why PJ Media is here to fight them.
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