Former United States Vice President Mike Pence has slammed media focus on Capitol riots as an attempt to divert attention from President Joe Biden’s “failures” and “demean” millions of supporters of Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump.

Pence said the “disastrous” US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan was the worst foreign policy debacle since Democratic President Carter oversaw the Iran Hostage Crisis.

“It never had to happen,” Pence said in an interview with Fox News on Monday night.

He said the deal Trump administration had reached with Taliban “actually was finished in February of 2020. That was a matter of weeks after President Trump gave the order to take out Qassem Soleimani. It was just a few months after we had eliminated the ISIS caliphate and taken down Abubakr al-Baghdadi.”

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Pence said he was in the room when Taliban leader Abdul Baradar seemed to have taken note of Trump’s warning of grave consequences if Americans were harmed in Afghanistan.

“We went 18 months without a single American casualty in Afghanistan,” he said.

He said the Taliban were emboldened by Biden administration’s “weakness” evident from its silence “when thousands of rockets were raining down on our cherished ally Israel from Hamas.”

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Thousands of Donald Trump supporters laid siege to the Capitol Hill in Washington on January 6, 2020, while a joint session of Congress was underway to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential elections. Five people were killed in the ensuing riots, with Pence ruing the violence as a “dark day in the history of the United States Capitol.”

Trump had been pressing Pence to block the certification, but the then Vice President said he had no “unilateral authority to decide which electoral votes should be counted.”

with which saw five people die, have been high on the news agenda recently after Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, leaked thousands of pages of internal documents, and accused the social media company of helping fuel the insurrection by choosing to amplify hate and misinformation on the site.

Asked asked about his relationship with Trump after the Capitol riots, Pence said the media wanted to “distract from the Biden administration’s failed agenda by focusing on one day in January” and “demean the character and intentions of 74 million Americans.”