The father of a Marine killed in Afghanistan last week said his meeting with President Joe Biden “didn’t go well,” describing Biden as out-of-touch and callous, according to Fox News.
“Well, initially, I wasn’t going to meet with him,” Mark Schmitz told Fox host Sean Hannity on Monday. “But then I felt I owed it to my son to at least have some words with him about how I felt—and it didn’t go well.”
Schmitz’s 20-year-old son, Jared, was one of 13 US service members killed by the ISIS-linked suicide-bombing outside the Kabul airport, which also claimed the lives of an estimated 160 or more Afghan civilians.
But Biden spent more time talking about his own son, Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015, “and that didn’t sit well with me,” Schmitz said.
He added that military leaders spent much more time talking to him than the president, who continued to check his watch multiple times while the bodies of the fallen soldiers were taken off the plane.
“I actually leaned into my son’s mother’s ear and I said ‘I swear to God if he checks his watch one more time…’ and [that] was probably only four times in,” Schmitz recalled.
“I couldn’t look at him anymore after that, considering, especially, the time and why we were there,” he continued. “I found it to be the most disrespectful thing I’d ever seen.”
Another Gold Star father, Darin Hoover, whose son Taylor Hoover was also killed in the attack, told Hannity that he altogether refused to meet with Biden.
“We said absolutely not,” said Hoover. “We didn’t want to deal with him. We didn’t want him anywhere near us. We as a family decided that that was the way it was going to be.”
In a separate media appearance, Kathy McCollum, the mother of 20-year-old Rylee McCollum, called into a radio show Sunday to slam Biden.
She noted that her son was looking forward to returning home to witness the birth of his child.
“Twenty years and 6 months old, getting ready to go home from freaking Jordan to be home with his wife to watch the birth of his son, and that feckless, dementia-ridden piece of crap just sent my son to die,” she said.
As of Monday, two online crowd-funding campaigns had raised more than $600,000 for Rylee McCollum’s widow and son.
