For four days last week, no one in the White House, State Department, the Intelligence Community, or most of the Pentagon knew that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was in the Walter Reed National Medical Center intensive care unit. When National Security Council spokesman John Kirby joined White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre for a joint press conference today, any hope we may have had that the story was overblown was not put to rest. On the contrary, the new information makes the situation look much worse.
Before going to today’s briefing, let’s review the bidding.
Late Friday afternoon, the Department of Defense released a statement saying that Austin was in the intensive care unit at Walter Reed NMC due to “complications” from an unspecified “elective” surgical procedure. The statement revealed that he’d been admitted to the ICU on New Year’s Day. As happens with these…
