Trump staffers involved in incident at Arlington
Washington — On Wednesday, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio said Vice President Kamala Harris “can go to hell” over the Biden administration’s handling of the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The remark stemmed from an “incident” during former President Donald Trump’s visit to Arlington National Cemetery on Monday to mark three years since a suicide bombing in Kabul killed 13 service members during the chaotic withdrawal from the country.
Trump visited part of the cemetery known as Section 60, where veterans of the post-9/11 conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are laid to rest. While there, an interaction occurred between Trump campaign staff and a cemetery official, according to multiple sources. The dispute appears to be over whether the Trump campaign’s photographer had permission to be there.
“Three years ago, 13 brave, innocent Americans died, and they died because Kamala Harris refused to do her job, and there hasn’t been a single investigation or a single firing,” Vance, Trump’s running mate, said in response to a CBS News reporter’s question about the interaction at Arlington National Cemetery while he campaigned in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Vance called Harris “disgraceful” and said the narrative should be that “Kamala Harris is so asleep at the wheel that she won’t even do an investigation into what happened, and she wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up.”
“She can go to hell,” he said.
Vance later said in Green Bay, Wisconsin, that his comments were justified.
“Sometimes I get frustrated and pissed off,” he said, blaming the Harris campaign for “trying to make a massive political issue” out of the incident at Arlington National Cemetery.
In a statement Monday marking the bombing, Harris said she “will fulfill our sacred obligation to care for our troops and their families and I will always honor their service and sacrifice.”
“As I have said, President Biden made the courageous and right decision to end America’s longest war,” she said.
The U.S. withdrawal came nearly 20 years after the war began in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The Biden administration and Congress have conducted several investigations into the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. A report from the White House and another from the State Department both partly faulted the Trump administration for the circumstances that contributed to its challenges.
Allison Novelo, Eleanor Watson, Jacob Rosen and Olivia Rinaldi contributed to this report.
Caitlin Yilek is a politics reporter at CBSNews.com, based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked for the Washington Examiner and The Hill, and was a member of the 2022 Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellowship with the National Press Foundation.
