Former Trump advisers blast Pompeo for Taliban 'surrender agreement' that could be 'fatal' to 2024 run

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been busy pointing fingers at the Biden administration over its botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.

However, Pompeo's central role in brokering a 2020 agreement with the Taliban that led to the withdrawal could come back to bite him if he opts to run for president in 2024, according to a new report from Politico.

Pompeo was famously photographed alongside Taliban co-founder Abdul Ghani Baradar during the negotiations — in "the type of image that could dot and complicate future election bids," Politico noted. He agreed to the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners and a review of sanctions against the organization, in a deal that did not include the Afghan government. Pompeo reportedly knew he could eventually pay "a political price" for the deal, but he went through with it anyway because he was under intense pressure from Trump to end the U.S.'s 20-year war in Afghanistan.

Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton blasted Pompeo for his role.

"Trying to extricate yourself from this withdrawal is I think difficult if not impossible to do, especially to rewrite history about what actually happened," Bolton told Politico. "I think that's a prescription for Democratic attack ads that would be fatal to someone's credibility."

Meanwhile, former national security adviser H.R. McMaster recently accused Pompeo of signing "surrender agreement with the Taliban."

"This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020," McMaster said. "The Taliban didn't defeat us. We defeated ourselves."

And former South Carolina Republican Gov. Nikki Haley, who could face off against Pompeo in a 2024 Republican primary, recently suggested that the Trump administration's decision to negotiate with the Taliban was akin to "dealing with the devil" — although she later walked back the comment.

"Bolton, for one, argued that if Trump had been in office today, he would have made the same choice as Biden," Politico reported.

"The argument is Trump would have retaliated massively," Bolton said, "yeah, well maybe, maybe not. Trump would have done what he thought would be politically beneficial. And what he thought was politically beneficial was getting out."

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