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"The flights may never fly": A CEO's effort to get an employee out of Afghanistan
"It's just a mess. We got the money and the planes, but the manifested people can't get into the airport. The flights may never fly."
That's how the CEO of a Silicon Valley startup valued at over $3 billion described his efforts to extract an employee and others from Afghanistan.
- The employee, an Afghan with a green card who once served as a translator for the U.S. military, did get out with his wife (who had been waiting more than two years for a visa). But other members of his family remain, including a brother who he tried to get through the airport gates, so we are keeping the name of the company and its employee anonymous.
Behind the scenes: An ad hoc group of tech investors and executives has been quietly pulling strings and writing checks, trying to help as many desperate people as possible. But successes are becoming harder to achieve.
- "One of my executives used to work in the defense industry, and offered to make some outreach," the CEO, who is an immigrant, explains to Axios.
- "Serious people wrote him back, saying that if we contribute money, then they could get him out. At first it sounded illicit, but I didn't care, this was someone's life at stake, pull that thread," the CEO adds.
- "Soon we learned that it was an ex-military logistics group on a humanitarian mission, and they needed to close the funding gap for a plane that would hold between 150 and 200 refugees."
- "We raised over $100,000 in just 12 hours from a lot of people who probably know, and who have been working on other evacuations. As a CEO it's a very interesting trust-building exercise, to wire $100,000 to someone you just met, but this is an immediate, life and death sort of situation."
But that plane hasn't yet arrived in Kabul. Nor have several of the other planes funded by the same donors, because their intended passengers remain stranded outside the airport gates.
- The employee and his wife got out on a military transport, first to Doha and then to D.C. The other plane was viewed as a backup for them and a primary way to fetch the rest of his family.
- "There are planes just sitting a few hours away [from Afghanistan] that could take out thousands of people, a lot of whom have been trying for years to get visas, but the whole process was slowed down by COVID and other factors ... I just got off the phone with someone trying to get a busload of 100 people into the airport, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen. Even 48 hours ago there were some people getting through ... Now we're basically having no success."
The bottom line: The U.S. military remains scheduled to leave Afghanistan on Tuesday, which would make evacuations even harder.
Mary Trump book: How she leaked Trump financials to NYT
In her new memoir, President Trump's niece reveals how she leaked hordes of confidential Trump family financial documents to the New York Times in an effort to expose her uncle, whom she portrays as a dangerous sociopath.
Why it matters: Trump was furious when he found out recently that Mary Trump, a trained psychologist, would be publishing a tell-all memoir. And Trump's younger brother, Robert, tried and failed to block the publication of "Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man."
- Axios obtained a copy ahead of the expected release later this month.
Behind the scenes: In what reads like a scene out of Spotlight, Mary Trump tells the story for the first time of how she secretly gave the New York Times much of the source material for its 14,000 word investigation of how "President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents."
- Mary Trump writes that in the spring of 2017, her doorbell rang. "When I opened the door, the only thing that registered was that the woman standing there. with her shock of curly blond hair and dark-rimmed glasses, was someone I didn't know. Her khakis, button-down shirt, and messenger bag placed her out of Rockville Center."
- "Hi. My name is Susanne Craig. I'm a reporter for the New York Times."
Mary Trump says she initially turned Craig away, telling her that she didn't talk to reporters and it was "so not cool" that she was showing up at her house.
But Craig persisted, giving Trump her business card and later following up with a letter "reiterating her belief that I had documents that could help 'rewrite the history of the President of the United States,' as she put it."
- After a month of sitting on her couch, scrolling through Twitter, and growing increasingly agitated as "Donald shredded norms, endangered alliances, and trod upon the vulnerable," the president's niece picked up Craig's card and called her.
- What follows is one of the most vivid passages in the book. Mary Trump reveals how she smuggled a motherlode of financial documents out of the law firm, Farrell Fritz.
- "At 3:00, I drove to the loading dock beneath the building, and nineteen boxes were loaded into the back of the borrowed truck I was driving since I couldn't work the clutch in my own car."
- "It was just beginning to get dark when I pulled into my driveway. The three reporters [from the New York Times] were waiting for me in David's white SUV, which sported a pair of reindeer antlers and a huge red nose wired to the grill."
- "When I showed them the boxes, there were hugs all around. It was the happiest I'd felt in months."
- The president's niece goes on to recount conversations with the president's sister, who suspected other members of the family were guilty of leaking to the Times.
Mary Trump's bottom line: Her book is laced with guilt and her motivations appear to be to alleviate that feeling."It wasn't enough for me to volunteer at an organization helping Syrian refugees," she writes. "I had to take Donald down."
Editor's note: This is a developing story and will be updated.



