On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) said that if Afghanistan Gold Star families were at previous congressional hearings, they would have heard former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley (Ret.) said the same things he said that day.
Host Jake Tapper said, “Now, Democrats ripped the hearing as overly political. You’re the Ranking Democrat on the committee. You said nothing new was really learned today. But Gen. Milley said he felt the hearing helped give Gold Star families some answers to their questions. It doesn’t seem as though the meeting was pointless to them, the Gold Star families.”
Meeks responded, “Well, what I said was, and it’s fact, if the Gold Star families were at the hearings when Gen. Milley testified before the House Armed Services Committee, he said the same thing and he kept saying, as I’ve said before. So, there was nothing new that was learned in this hearing. And sometimes, I actually felt very sad for the Gold Star families, because the generals kept saying over and over that, in order to really get out and to answer their questions, we’ve got to look at the policies that have taken place and the decisions that were made, not just for the last — for three days or for a week, but the whole 20 years that we were in Afghanistan.”
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