CNN "The Lead with Jake Tapper" - Transcript: Interview with Seth Moulton

Interview

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TAPPER: Kaitlan Collins, thank you so much.

Joining me now to discuss, Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton of Massachusetts. He's a U.S. Marine Corps veteran. He served four tours in Iraq.

Congressman, you were just on this briefing about the situation in Iraq where Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said multiple Americans have been beaten by the Taliban in Kabul. What else did you learn?

REP. SETH MOULTON (D-MA): Well, we learned that a tremendous amount of the success of this operation is in the hands of the Taliban right now. That we're counting on the Taliban to allow us to get people safely to the airport, and we're counting on the Taliban to allow us to continue this operation and not massacre people long enough for it to be complete. That we're counting on the Taliban not to attack our forces on the ground. It's extraordinary that we've put ourselves in this position.

We also learned that the administration has made changes to make the process go more quickly, including relaxing some of the screening requirements happening at Kabul.

But, Jake, in my opinion, this is all happening way too late. Myself and others have called on the administration to start this evacuation months ago.

TAPPER: Right.

MOULTON: And the fact that we're figuring it out on the fly right now is totally unacceptable.

TAPPER: Congressman, President Biden said something that's just empirically not true. He said that Americans are not having difficulty getting to the airport. Now, does he know it's not true, or are people not sharing this information with him?

MOULTON: Well, of course, I don't know. I'm not in the Oval Office. But all you need to do is look on TV and see the videos floating around the Internet of people trying to get to the gate and being crushed on the way there.

I spent all night communicating with Afghans, with Afghan-Americans, with people on the ground trying to get to the airport gate and unable to do so. It doesn't matter if you're an Afghan, an American citizen or anyone else, you simply can't get through the crowd right now to get access to freedom.

TAPPER: And what do they need? I understand the problem of Americans and Afghan allies who are in Kandahar or can't get to Kabul because the Taliban is taking control of the country. They have checkpoints on the roads. But once people are in Kabul and once people have gotten through that first perimeter and they're outside the airport wall, whether we're talking about Afghan allies who have the right paperwork or American citizens, in some cases, they're standing there in this crowd, they're looking at service members, they're yelling.

What's the problem? Why can't they get in? Are U.S. service members being given rules of engagement that preclude them from being able to help these allies or American citizens?

MOULTON: We simply can't get people through the gate quickly enough. We don't have enough State Department employees on the ground. The State Department announced that they have 20 consular officers in Kabul and they're waiting for 40. Forty people to handle tens of thousands of evacuees? It's completely unacceptable.

All the marines I've talked to on the ground say that they need more troops. So, when the president and the secretary of defense claim that they are giving every resource necessary and available to this effort, that's just not true because you have marine commanders on the ground saying they're stretched thin, they need more troops. If they had more troops they'd be able to process more people getting in through the gates and that's the solution to this present problem.

TAPPER: Look, I get that this is an incredibly dangerous and difficult situation, and I can't even imagine the blowback were President Biden to surge troops to tell them to go out into Kabul, to go out into the rest of the country to rescue people, and then all of a sudden, there was a terrorist attack or the Taliban started firing and we lost American service members.

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I understand that that's the equation. But is that what is holding up the situation, that fear, understandable, that concern, understandable, that doing anything more than what they're doing right now would subject U.S. service members to danger?

MOULTON: It must be. But, Jake, I don't think you've got the equation quite right. Because the reality is that as we don't -- while we don't do those operations, while we don't surge more troops into Kabul to make sure we can get more people out, that means people are going to die.

So, this is the challenge with U.S. military operations. And I face this challenge on the ground as a marine commander myself. There were a lot of times where I didn't want to do a mission because I was worried about the welfare of my troops. But I knew that if we didn't attempt the mission, more people would die.

Well, listen, right now, people are headed to their deaths at the hands of the Taliban because we're not getting people out quickly enough. So we need to do what it takes. We need to make sure we understand that we want to minimize risk to the U.S. troops. But if we're not using U.S. troops, if we're not getting the troops there that we need, there will definitely be people who die as a result. TAPPER: And just to reiterate because so many times Biden defenders

try to say that anybody that is being critical of this evacuation wants troops in Afghanistan forever, wants a forever war. You're in favor of the withdrawal of U.S. service members, you're just being critical of how this evacuation's being done?

MOULTON: I mean, look, there's no one who wants to bring the troops home more than those of us who have had to go over and fight in these forever wars.

TAPPER: Yeah.

MOULTON: I don't like having troops in Afghanistan or Iraq or wherever forever. But I understand this is a nuanced calculation. And how we withdraw, the timeline for doing so not just over the course of weeks but potentially over the course of months and years, how we conduct that withdrawal, all this really matters.

And there's a second and third order of consequences here too. I've heard from veterans all across the country who are just distraught at what they see going on, seeing their friends the people they put their lives -- in whose hands they put their lives being potentially massacred in the coming days -- I mean, look, you're going to see a rise in veteran suicide as a result of the way that we handled this withdrawal. That costs American lives. That costs service member lives, too.

TAPPER: Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, thank you, sir, and as always, thank you for your service.

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