Joe Biden has demonstrated repeatedly during his seven months as president that the promise of transparency is a hard one to keep.
During a press conference on March 26, he was asked by a reporter when he would commit to transparency about the deplorable conditions in which migrants were being housed on the southern border. Biden’s answer, which indeed was revealing, was “I will commit to transparency as soon as I am in a position to be able to implement what we’re doing right now.”
The matter came to a head two days later when an administration official requested that senators touring the border facility in Donna, Texas delete photos they had taken.
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The situation in Afghanistan has been especially rich with opportunities for Biden to show his true colors when it comes to transparency. On July 23, Reuters reports via the New York Post, Biden “pressured Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani to create the ‘perception’ that the Taliban weren’t winning, ‘whether it’s true or not.'”
And now a new report, this one by Forbes, notes that the administration erased from federal websites reports detailing the $82.9 billion in military equipment U.S. forces left behind and are now in the hands of the Taliban:
The scrubbed audits and reports included detailed accounting of what the U.S. had provided to Afghan forces, down to the number of night vision devices, hand grenades, Black Hawk helicopters, and armored vehicles.
Reports further quantified 208 aircraft and helicopters; 75,000 war vehicles – including 22 Humvees, 50,000 tactical vehicles and nearly 1,000 mine resistant vehicles; and 600,000 weapons – including 350,000 M4 and M16 rifles, 60,000 machine guns, and 25,000 grenade launchers.
