The US said a Marine could not adopt an Afghan girl. Records show officials helped him get her

(AP) — The judge wanted everyone in the courtroom to know that when he’d signed a war orphan over to an American Marine he thought it was an emergency — that the child injured on the battlefield in Afghanistan was on death’s door, with neither a family nor a country to claim her.

A lawyer for the federal government stood up.

“That is not what happened,” she told the judge: almost everything he’d believed about the baby was untrue.

This group had gathered 15 times by then, in secret proceedings in this small-town Virginia courtroom to try to fix what had become an international incident. Fluvanna County Circuit Judge Richard Moore had granted an adoption of the orphan to U.S. Marine Joshua Mast and his wife, Stephanie, while the baby was in Afghanistan, 7,000 miles away.

Now the U.S. government insisted the baby’s fate had never been the judge’s to decide; officials in President Donald Trump’s first administration had chosen to unite her with relatives months before Moore gave her away, according to once-secret transcripts of the November 2022 hearing.

Thousands of pages of those transcripts and court documents were recently released as a result of The Associated Press’ three-year fight for access after a 2022 AP report about the adoption raised alarms at the highest le...