GOP lawmaker Markwayne Mullin (Congressman, Oklahoma) defends attempted Afghanistan rescue mission: ‘I’m not Rambo’. “Out of all the guys that I was working with, I’m the low man on the totem pole, and I understood that, but they felt like I could be of assistance to them.”

“These are Tier One operators,” he said. “These are Delta [Force] guys, Special Forces, these guys are legit. I’m nobody. I’m just a congressman … [but] when you see a problem, how do you say no if you can be an asset? And they believed I could be an asset.”
“How? Logistically, maybe,” he continued. “Open the doors for them, making phone calls, and being able to take in the SIVs [Afghan visa applicants] or the AMCITS [American citizens] as they came onto the plane.”

Mullin, who was first elected to Congress in 2012 and doesn’t have a military background, told host Bret Baier that as the American withdrawal from Afghanistan was winding down, he started getting calls from “friends of mine that was in the service that said, ‘Can you help our interpreter get out?'”

But Mullin said his plane’s landing permission was repeatedly canceled — forcing the flight to circle the airport “probably for an hour” while he negotiated with the control tower via text message.

“We had five [permissions] canceled. Every time they canceled, the agency that was trying to get us in would give us a new one,” he recalled. “They actually went into the tower to say, ‘Let them land’ … [but] they would never let us in Afghanistan.” Mullin added that he believed the flight’s rejection was “100 percent directed by the State Department.“