U.S. President Biden speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Aug. 24, 2021.
Yuri Gripas | Abaca | Bloomberg | Getty Images
WASHINGTON – The White House took the unusual step of clearing President Joe Biden’s schedule on Thursday, following a deadly attack near the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, which killed several U.S. service members and injured others.
The violence added fresh urgency to the frantic effort already underway to evacuate tens of thousands of Afghans and foreign nationals ahead of Biden’s Aug. 31 deadline for the removal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.
Biden began the day Thursday the same way he has for more than a week, with a national security briefing on the withdrawal effort in Afghanistan.
Attendees included Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Gen. Lloyd Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mark Milley and commanders on the ground in Afghanistan, according to White House officials.
After that, Biden was scheduled to meet with newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett at 11:30 a.m. ET.
But that meeting has been delayed. Israeli journalists traveling with Bennett left the White House at around noon, a good indication that Bennett had also departed the grounds.
The White House has yet to give a new time for the meetings with Bennett, which are set to include an Oval Office téte-a-téte and an expanded bilateral meeting with aides.
Biden was also scheduled to hold a virtual meeting at 3:00 p.m. Thursday with governors who have volunteered to host newly arriving Afghan refugees in their states.
Shortly after noon, however, a White House official said that this meeting had been canceled.
Biden moved up to the Oval Office around midday after spending much of his morning in the secure, underground Situation Room.
The reshuffling of so many presidential events underscores the gravity of the attacks, which took place as Biden is under pressure from both the political left and right to keep troops in Afghanistan after the 31st, and continue airlifting Afghans at risk of reprisals under the new Taliban government.
The bombings are believed to have been carried out by a splinter group of ISIS, and they dovetail with Biden’s warnings in recent days of the imminent danger of terrorist attacks.
The president cited this danger as a justification for not extending the deadline past the 31st.
At the Pentagon, a press briefing scheduled for 10:30 a.m. Thursday morning was canceled.
So was a press briefing at the White House with members of the president’s Covid-19 task force.
The daily White House press briefing, originally scheduled for 12:00 P.M. has been “delayed,” according to a White House official.
As of 1:00 p.m., there had been no announcement of a new time for the daily briefing.
