Two fathers of U.S. Marines killed in the ISIS-K linked blast at the Kabul airport criticized President Joe Biden for the way he behaved during a meeting with the mourning families.
Mark Schmitz and Darin Hoover, the respective fathers of Missouri Marine Jared Schmitz and Utah Marine Darin Taylor Hoover Jr., spoke with Fox New Channel host Sean Hannity on Monday evening about the tragic losses their families have suffered.
Hoover declined to even meet with the president saying he “didn’t want [Biden] anywhere near us.”
Schmitz decided to take the meeting and said Biden during their time together focused more on his own deceased son, Beau Biden, than he did Jared.
Biden died in 2015, at 46, from an aggressive form of brain cancer. He has served in Iraq with the U.S. Army before his death.
“Initially, I wasn’t going to meet with him,” Schmidt said about meeting the president. “But then I felt I owed it to my son to at least have some words with him about how I felt – and it didn’t go well.”
Biden was photographed over the weekend checking his watch during the ceremony at the Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware, at which the caskets of the 13 fallen American troops were greeted.
Hoover told Hannity that the one viral photograph did not tell the entire story and that the president actually checked his watch each time a casket was de-planed.
“That didn’t happen just once,” Hoover said. “It happened on every single one that came out of that airplane. It happened on every single one of them. They would release the salute, and he would look down at his watch on every last one, all 13, he looked down at his watch.”
Schmitz said he too had seen Biden check his watch repeatedly throughout the ceremony.
“I leaned into my son’s mother’s ear and I said ‘I swear to God if he checks his watch one more time’ – and that was probably only four times in. I couldn’t look at him anymore after that,’ he said.
Said Hoover: As a father, seeing that and the disrespect, and hearing from his former leaders, one of [Taylor’s] master sergeants said … that this was avoidable – that they left them over there. They had them over there and let them down, and we can’t have that. It can’t happen ever again.”
