WASHINGTON — A top Trump administration intelligence official said Friday that the suspected Afghan terrorist who gunned down two National Guard service members was “not vetted” before being allowed to enter the US in 2021.
Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, posted on X that the Biden administration was to blame for the lapse in vetting of Rahmanullah Lakanwal — who is being charged with killing one of the troops, Guardswoman Sarah Beckstrom.
The NCTC director said there were more than 2 million in total who entered “from Muslim majority nations & regions surged … often with minimal scrutiny amid record border crossings” — including 85,000 Afghans who “were rapidly admitted into our country without the rigorous vetting that has protected us in the past.”
“This is a deadly combination,” Kent declared, noting that the suspected terrorist “was only vetted to serve as a soldier to fight against the Taliban, AQ, & ISIS IN Afghanistan, he was NOT vetted for his suitability to come to America and live among us as a neighbor, integrate into our communities, or eventually become an American citizen.”
A senior US official confirmed that he had been “vetted to fight” alongside US forces against Taliban, al-Qaeda and ISIS militants between 2011 and 2021 — but that this was a “low standard” that “has never been used before to let people into the US.”
“Prior to Biden it took 18 months or longer for someone to be granted a Special Immigrant Visa, including the applicant needing to flee to a third country so the US government could interview and vet them,” the official noted. “Biden threw all of this out and applied tactical war time vetting to people seeking entry into the homeland.”
Both the Department of Homeland Security and CIA have also blamed President Trump’s predecessor for enabling the DC shooting with lax vetting during the hasty withdrawal from Kabul in August 2021.
“[T]he Biden Administration justified bringing the alleged shooter to the United States in September 2021 due to his prior work with the U.S. Government, including CIA, as a member of a partner force in Kandahar, which ended shortly following the chaotic evacuation,” said CIA Director John Ratcliffe on Thursday.
Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin added that Lakanwal had been “paroled in” with tens of thousands of other Afghan refugees.
Follow the latest on the National Guard shooting in Washington, DC:
Lakanwal, 29, ambushed two National Guard members in a cowardly shooting on Thanksgiving eve in DC. Both had been deployed from West Virginia as part of a federal surge to crack down on crime in the nation’s capital.
The armed soldiers were just blocks away from the White House when he rounded a corner and opened fire with a revolver, striking Beckstrom, 20, first. She died the following day at a local hospital.
Lakanwal only fired four bullets from the handgun before picking up Beckstrom’s rifle and turning it on Guardsman Andrew Wolfe, 24, who was hit and remains in critical condition at the hospital.
He exchanged gunfire with other troops before being subdued by an unidentified hero Guardsman, who bull-rushed the shooter while he was reloading and stabbed him repeatedly in the head with a pocket knife to subdue him.
Lakanwal was relocated to the US under former President Joe Biden’s “Operation Allies Welcome” program, which brought nearly 80,000 Afghans to the US who had battled against the Taliban.
The Kandahar Strike Force he joined was a CIA-backed paramilitary group that fought alongside US forces — but was also accused of being a death squad that tortured and executed civilians.
Roughly 10,000 members of the so-called “Zero Units” eventually settled in Washington State near Seattle. Lakanwal ended up in Bellingham, Wash., with his wife and five children in September 2021.
McLaughlin noted in her statement Thursday that “this monster would not have been removed because of his parole,” even if the Trump administration sought to remove him earlier this year.
“Biden signed into law that parole program, and then entered into the 2023 Ahmed Court Settlement, which bound USCIS to adjudicate his asylum claim on an expedited basis,” McLaughlin said.
The Trump administration has since “stopped indefinitely pending further review of security and vetting protocols” any immigration requests “relating to Afghan nationals,” she added.
“The Trump Administration is also reviewing all asylum cases approved under the Biden Administration, which failed to vet these applicants on a massive scale.”
The president also personally directed a sweeping review of green card holders from 19 countries of concern, and asylum applications from all countries are now paused.
Tommy Pigott, principal deputy spokesperson at the State Department, said Friday that visa processing for Afghan nationals is now paused in the wake of the horrific terror attack.
“The Trump administration has no higher priority than ensuring the safety of Americans and has launched a whole-of-government effort to defend America’s national security,” Pigott said.
According to a Homeland Security inspector general’s report in 2022, officials “did not always have critical data to properly screen, vet, or inspect the evacuees” from Afghanistan in particular. That Biden-era program let around 76,000 Afghans into the US.
Lakanwal applied for both a special immigrant visa and asylum, the latter of which he asked for in December 2024 and it was granted the following April.
Chad Robichaux, a former Force Recon Marine who deployed to Afghanistan eight times and was part of a coalition effort that evacuated 17,000 nationals from the country in 2021, claimed to The Post that there was “zero vetting” for tens of thousands of Afghans flown out of Kabul in the final days of the withdrawal.
“Probably close to 100,000 of them were flown straight from Kabul to the United States to different airfields, and they were let go into the American population. We have no idea who they are — zero vetting,” said Robichaux, who authored the 2023 book “Saving Aziz: How the Mission to Help One Became a Calling to Rescue Thousands from the Taliban.”
“Just because you’re approved to work with special operations of the CIA, that doesn’t give you a pathway to the United States. You still have to go through the State Department. You still have to apply. He would still have to have applied for a special immigrant visa process,” he added.
Trump suggested that Lakanwal “went nuts” shortly before traveling to DC and firing on US troops — and Robichaux shared that as a special operations soldier, he worked side by side with other Afghans who were later “disloyal” to the US and “turned on” them.
“I know guys that have lost their lives being out on operations in Afghanistan,” he recalled, mentioning one Afghan national who was trained by the CIA, worked with his team and whom he wrote about in his book about rescuing an interpreter.
“I, like, slept on the side of mountains with this guy … trusted him with my life. He turns on us,” he recounted, “has a vehicle bomb driven into my house, had 12 of our teammates rolled up, captured and killed, and I got abducted by a foreign intelligence agency because of this guy.”
Robichaux added: “They didn’t know who was on those planes. He could have worked for the CIA. He could have worked for the Taliban.”
One of Lakanwal’s relatives told NBC News that he eventually worked as a contractor for Amazon Flex as a delivery driver after resettling in the US.
A friend also recalled to the New York Times that he suffered mental problems after seeing combat in Afghanistan “When he saw blood, bodies, and the wounded, he could not tolerate it,” the friend was quoted as saying. “It put a lot of pressure on his mind.”
A rep for Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
