Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle criticized President Obama’s deal to bring home captured soldier Bowe Bergdahl on Sunday morning talk shows.
On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Senate intelligence chairwoman and California Democrat Dianne Feinstein complained that Congress had not been properly informed about the terms of Berghdal’s return.
“It’s hard to be comfortable when you really haven’t been briefed on the intricacies of carrying out this agreement,” she said.
Of the deal, Feinstein said, “It’s a mixed bag at best. But let me just say this. Should we see that our GIs who are taken hostage are returned? Absolutely.”
Her House counterpart, Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, took a predictably harsher tone on ABC’s “This Week.” “We have made a serious, serious geopolitical mistake. We’ve empowered the Taliban,” he said. “The one thing that they wanted more than anything … was recognition from the U.S. government so they can use that to propagandize against areas that are unsecure still in Afghanistan. They got all of that.”
Rogers added, “We are going to pay for this decision for years.”
Senator John McCain went even further. “What we’re doing here is reconstitution — reconstituting the Taliban government, the same guys that are mass murderers,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“Fox News Sunday” devoted its entire show to the Bergdahl deal, including an interview with former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Asked about the president’s failure to notify Congress 30 days before a prisoner release from Guantanamo, Mukasey said that Obama “broke the law, but I believe that the law itself is unconstitutional.”
Mukasey mostly took issue with how the president announced the deal. “Having made this questionable decision, the president was essentially taking a victory lap, which I thought was frankly absurd,” he told host Chris Wallace. ABC also aired excerpts from its forthcoming interview with Hillary Clinton, in which she again addressed whether she’ll run for president – or rather, when she might address whether she will run for president. Clinton said she wouldn’t make a decision before the end of this year or early next year. “I just want to kind of get through this year, travel around the country, sign books, help in the midterm elections in the fall, and then take a deep breath and kind of go through my pluses and minuses about what I will – and will not – be thinking about as I make the decision,” Clinton told Diane Sawyer. Clinton also addressed the concussion that for weeks has been the focus of Republican talking points, saying there had been “no lingering effects” from the injury. NBC’s “Meet the Press” was preempted by the French Open.
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