Washington: Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has claimed that she had to cancel her trip to war-torn Afghanistan as the White House had “leaked” her plans to fly commercially and caused a security risk.
US President Donald Trump had Friday denied Pelosi’s “excursion” to Brussels and war-torn Afghanistan, a tit-for-tat retaliation for her suggesting him to reschedule his annual State of the Union address slated for January 29.
The speaker had made the suggestion citing security concerns triggered by a nearly four-week federal government shutdown.
The developments have only deepened the divide between the Trump-led Republican party and Pelosi-led Democrats which are already at loggerhead over the US-Mexico border issue that led to the shutdown. Speaker Pelosi accused Trump of endangering the lives of Americans by revealing to the world about her trip to Afghanistan. She told reporters Friday that “any time anyone with a bright light, of the presence of a high-level, or any level of Congressional Delegation in a region, you’ve heightened the danger. And this was a high power.”
Recounting the sequence of events, Pelosi said around 2 pm on Thursday she and other members of a Congressional delegation were in a bus to Andrews Joint Air Base for the military plane headed to Afghanistan.“Our Members who were on the bus – I was ready to join them for a 2:15 wheels up from here to Andrews Air Force Base to visit our troops, pay our respects; to thank them for their service, their sacrifice and their dedication; to get a measure of the leadership of Afghanistan, strength of their military, the morale of their people, she said. (PTI)
