On Monday’s broadcast of “CNN News Central,” CNN Senior Law Enforcement Analyst former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe stated that “vetting is a very imprecise, imperfect science” that relies on “accessing information that we have in our own possession or can get from the country that that person’s coming from. That information is often inaccurate. It can be unreliable, as in the case here, you don’t have really a functioning government in Afghanistan when he tried to come over to the United States. Essentially, we’re left with a process where the absence of any negative information equals a positive result. And that is, by definition, not completely reliable.”
Co-host Kate Bolduan asked, “[P]art of the — kind of the narrative around this is that both the president, and we heard it from the Homeland Security secretary as well, casting blame on the prior administration, on the Biden administration, for, quote — unquote, this. You say that is oversimplified to do that. Why?”
McCabe responded, “Yeah, grossly oversimplified. I think it’s — because — they’re trying to create the presumption that the mistakes were made under the prior administration, when we know the facts are that he was vetted, both under the prior administration and under the current administration, who made the decision to grant him asylum here just this year. I think both of those conclusions kind of ignore the obvious fact, which is that vetting is a very imprecise, imperfect science. Vetting depends exclusively on checking someone out by accessing information that we have in our own possession or can get from the country that that person’s coming from. That information is often inaccurate. It can be unreliable, as in the case here, you don’t have really a functioning government in Afghanistan when he tried to come over to the United States. Essentially, we’re left with a process where the absence of any negative information equals a positive result. And that is, by definition, not completely reliable. There may have been negative information out there that we just didn’t have access to. So, vetting processes are never perfect. There is no guarantee, when you look into someone’s background to grant them entry, that they’ll come here and never make a mistake or commit a crime or do something violent. This appears to be one of those instances that obviously’s gone horribly wrong.”
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