Newly confirmed U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio raised alarms about the actual number of American hostages held by the Taliban—figures far greater than previously reported.
This disclosure, coming just days after the Secretary’s appointment, points to a disturbing possibility: Biden’s administration knew about the higher hostage counts but chose to hide this critical information from the public.
Marco Rubio, voicing his concerns on X, highlighted the dire situation: “Just hearing the Taliban is holding more American hostages than has been reported. If this is true, we need to immediately place a VERY BIG bounty on their top leaders, maybe even bigger than the one we had on Bin Laden.”
Rubio’s did not specify the exact number of Americans still captive.
Just hearing the Taliban is holding more American hostages than has been reported. If this is true, we will have to immediately place a VERY BIG bounty on their top leaders, maybe even bigger than the one we had on Bin Laden.
— Secretary Marco Rubio (@secrubio) January 25, 2025
The Gateway Pundit previously reported that Anna Corbett, whose husband Ryan was held hostage by the Taliban, spoke to ‘Fox and Friends’ after her call with Joe Biden.
Corbett was upset after Joe Biden only gave her a few minutes. Anna said current U.S. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz spoke with her for an hour outside at Mar-a-Lago.
She was hopeful Trump would be able to bring her husband home. Her husband has been held by the Taliban since 2022, after the Biden regime surrendered the country to the Taliban.
Joe Biden wanted to trade Ryan and two other Americans in exchange for Muhammad Rahim, an aide to Osama bin Laden, and one of the remaining detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
Just before Joe Biden ended his term in office, the U.S. freed an Afghan convicted of drug smuggling and extremism, Muhammad Rahim, for two American citizens.
Ryan Corbett and William Wallace McKenty were the two Americans who were freed.
In 2021, The Gateway Pundit reported that the Biden regime and its woke generals abandoned thousands of Americans in Afghanistan, including up to 14,000 U.S. legal permanent residents (LPRs), during their quick escape from the terrorist-controlled country.
However, the exact number was difficult to determine due to challenges in tracking and the fluid nature of the situation.
“Isn’t the operating assumption about 14,000?” Republican Rep. Chris Smith asked Biden’s Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources, Brian McKeon, during a hearing in 2021.
As many as 14,000 Americans were left to fend for themselves when Biden and the woke generals quickly fled the country due to their artificial timeline. This was an atrocity that was completely ignored by the legacy media, who worked overtime to prop up their friends at the Biden White House.
Meanwhile, approximately 124,000 Afghans were able to flee the country in August during ‘Operation Allies Refuge,’ one of the largest air evacuations of civilians in American history—most of them were unvetted.
A new report was released from the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 2022 and disclosed that up to 15,000 Americans were believed to be in Afghanistan at the peak of the crisis, with only 6,000 managing to evacuate by the August 31 deadline.
This left approximately 9,000 Americans to fend for themselves under Taliban rule—a catastrophic failure largely ignored by mainstream media, which continued to shield the Biden administration.
According to the report at the time:
“On August 17, 2021, and at the height of evacuation efforts, senior State Department officials leading the evacuation task force indicated there were 10,000 to 15,000 Americans in Afghanistan, according to the F-77 report.
By August 31, when the president ordered an end to evacuation operations, State and DoD had evacuated approximately 6,000 American citizens. Even taking the most conservative estimates from the F-77 report, this meant the United States left at least a few thousand people behind.
However, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in September, asserted that only a “small number” of American citizens, “approximately 100-150 remained in Afghanistan who still wished to depart.”
If Marco Rubio’s report is correct, Antony Blinken committed perjury in Congress. This story was ignored and quickly forgotten by the fake news legacy media. Like the Biden regime, they really didn’t care.
The post Marco Rubio Exposes Biden Regime’s Cover-Up: Taliban Holds More American Hostages Than Reported — Calls for Massive Bounties on Their Leadership appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.