White House press secretary Jen Psaki took heat on Wednesday for arguing there are security concerns that can account for why Americans in Afghanistan have not been able to flee the country via planes, saying that in some cases there is a lack of documentation.

A reporter asked about the Taliban holding Americans in Afghanistan, where the group has been grounding flights amid negotiations with the U.S. State Department.

"I’m trying to square where things actually stand," CNN’s Phil Mattingly asked. "What is your understanding of the hold up and if the Taliban is preventing them, what levers do you have right now?"

Psaki said the Biden administration is trying to "press" the Taliban into allowing people to leave the country but declared "we’re not on the ground" to actually ensure progress is made. 

"We are continuing to press the Taliban, the Secretary of State is, to do more to abide by allowing American citizens, individuals who are legal permanent residents, and individuals with proper documentation to depart the country," Psaki said. "It is also true that we don’t have a role in preventing flights from taking off. We are not on the ground, so that is not something the U.S. government is doing."

The press secretary then cited security concerns. 

"Some of these planes and some of the issues is, ‘Where are they going to land?’ So a number of these planes, they may have a handful of American citizens, but they may have several hundred individuals where we don’t have manifest for them, we don’t know what the security protocols are for them, we don’t know what their documentation is, and there is a fundamental question, and this is one of the hard choices you face in government," Psaki said. "Are we going to allow a plane with hundreds of people where we don’t know who they are, we don’t know what security protocols have been put in place, to land on a U.S. military base."

Critics accused her of "downplaying" the situation.

Psaki said there are "reasonable questions" pertaining to why the U.S. wouldn’t allow such a thing. 

"There are some challenges as it relates to documentation," she said. 

Listen to this back and forth between Psaki and Fox News reporter Peter Doocy:

The video starts with Psaki saying that we have to engage with the Taliban in order to get American citizens, as well as legal residents and SIV applicants out of the country, but that we aren’t recognizing them as a legitimate government yet, because they have a lot of work to do before that happens.

Doocy pushes back, asking why we have to engage with a terrorist group that just made their new acting interior minister a Haqqani Network Terrorist with a huge bounty on his head, who is known for having killed Americans.

Psaki responds saying “should we not talk to the people who are overseeing Afghanistan and just leave it and not get the rest of the American citizens out?”

Seriously, what a clown show the Biden administration has become because of him. The answer to that last question is ‘hell no, we should have stayed there until we had all of these people out of the country in the first place.’

Seriously. Any president with balls would apologize for his error in judgement and rain down hell on the Taliban if they don’t let us get our people out now. But Biden is still claiming Afghanistan is an extraordinary success.

As far as recognizing the Taliban as legitimate, I think that’s already happened. Biden did that when he surrendered to them at the end of August and ran away, leaving American citizens in their country. Now they have all the recognition from us they want, holding our people hostage to continue to demonstrate how they’ve defeated the mighty United States.

This is the state of America under Biden and it’s absolutely unAmerican.