(Allentown) Joe Biden answered “yes” on Friday to journalists asking him whether Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin, who was hospitalized, had made an error of judgment by not informing him until very late of his health problems.
The president, traveling to a town in Pennsylvania, however, also said he had confidence in his secretary.
PHOTO EVAN VUCCI, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Joe Biden visited Nowhere Coffee during his visit to Emmaus, Pennsylvania, on January 12.
Lloyd Austin, 70, has been hospitalized since 1er January due to complications following an operation related to prostate cancer which he was diagnosed with in early December.
This diagnosis and the two hospitalizations that followed were only communicated to the country’s senior authorities, starting with Joe Biden, in recent days, which caused an outcry in the press and among his Republican adversaries, in the middle of the year electoral.
Earlier Friday, the White House assured that the head of the Pentagon had supervised the American-British strikes on the Houthi rebels in Yemen “from his hospital bed”.
Lloyd Austin was “totally involved all day yesterday [jeudi] in preparations for these strikes launched against the Houthi rebels in Yemen early Friday,” declared John Kirby, spokesperson for the National Security Council, on the MSNBC channel.
These strikes, led by the United States and the United Kingdom, targeted 30 military sites held by Yemeni rebels, according to an American general.
Close to Iran, the bane of the United States, the Houthis have increased missile and drone attacks in the Red Sea in recent months, in support, according to them, of the Palestinians in Gaza, a territory relentlessly bombed and completely besieged by Israel. after the bloody Hamas attack on Israeli soil on October 7.