Multiple key Republican members on the House Foreign Affairs Committee are harshly criticizing the State Department for continuing to withhold a key Afghanistan dissent cable from them.
The State Department announced last Wednesday that it would allow Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), chairman of the committee, and Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), its ranking member, to look at a somewhat redacted version of the July 2021 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul after the GOP had moved toward holding Secretary of State Antony Blinken in contempt over his refusal to comply with a congressional subpoena to make the document available.
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But GOP members of the committee, many of them veterans of the war in Afghanistan, said that the slight cave by Blinken is not nearly good enough.
Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL), a former Army Green Beret who served in Afghanistan, told the Washington Examiner that Blinken’s offer was a “red herring” and “specious.”
“It’s a weak excuse,” Waltz said. “And again, I keep asking, if this was such an outstanding success, as the president and Blinken said, then what is there to hide? This should be shared with us, and we wouldn’t see much, in line with their logic — what is there to hide?”
Waltz said it was problematic for the State Department itself to attempt to “summarize the whistleblowing” by U.S. Embassy in Kabul employees who were blowing the whistle against the State Department, saying, “It just doesn’t even come close to passing the smell test. Talk about a conflict of interest.”
House Republicans have argued since late 2021 that the Biden administration has been stonewalling McCaul’s investigations into the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, which ended with a chaotic evacuation, a Taliban takeover, hundreds of Americans and thousands of Afghan allies left behind, and 13 U.S. service members killed in an ISIS-K suicide bombing.
“My stance is that the country should be able to see it. It should be declassified and released. And certainly, you know who should be briefed on it is the 13 Gold Star families," Waltz told the Washington Examiner. "But absent that, yes, members of Congress should be able to see something of this significance.”
McCaul previously announced his committee would consider a resolution to hold Blinken in contempt on May 24. The proposed resolution recommends that the House find Blinken “in contempt of Congress for refusal to comply with a subpoena duly issued by the Committee on Foreign Affairs.” Waltz said that the “bottom line is, I’m going to continue to push for the contempt vote.”
McCaul is slated to review the dissent cable and Blinken’s response to it at the State Department on Tuesday afternoon.
House Republicans have grown frustrated after Blinken repeatedly refused to hand over the cable, which was signed by two dozen embassy staffers in Kabul and sent to the State Department in mid-July 2021, just over a month before the Taliban took over the country. The cable is known to have criticized the State Department’s planning for the coming evacuation and warned that Kabul could collapse soon after the U.S. moved to withdraw its troops.
“I think they have finally caved. I would say Blinken blinked, and now, they’re going to produce it,” McCaul told Maria Bartiromo on Fox News Sunday over the weekend. “But, it’s not just for me and the ranking member. As chairman, I want every member of my committee to see it, including the Afghan veterans who served so bravely. They deserve to see it. The American people deserve to see it, and the Gold Star families.”
House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans said they want to see the cable and want the U.S. public to see it, too.
“When our team rescued Americans from the Taliban 2021, I witnessed the Biden admin's dereliction of duty during the withdrawal,” Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “It is incumbent upon Congress to hold those responsible accountable for the American lives lost and that’s exactly what the House Foreign Affairs Committee has been doing. After months of testimonies and mounting pressure, the State Department has decided to provide access to an internal cable about the botched withdrawal but only to Rep. McCaul and Rep. Meeks.”
Mills, a veteran of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, added that “this is personal to me,” and so, “I demand transparency not just for the entire House Foreign Affairs committee but for the American people.”
Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Oversight and Accountability Subcommittee, is a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician who lost both his legs in Afghanistan in 2010. His office directed the Washington Examiner to a statement he made last week in which he called Blinken only allowing McCaul and Meeks to see the cable a "crappy compromise.”
Mast called Blinken’s intransigence “screwed up” and said as subcommittee chairman and “a veteran who left limbs in Kandahar, my job is to make sure that the 13 Gold Star families and millions of veterans who poured their blood, sweat, and tears into Afghanistan get the answers they deserve.” He called the dissent cable “an essential piece of the puzzle.”
"Every Member of this Committee has a right to view this cable because every Member of this Committee has a responsibility to conduct oversight and get to the bottom of how the Biden Administration got it so wrong,” Mast said.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) told the Washington Examiner that “contempt of Blinken is 100% still on the table, and it has to be, because after so many lies, this administration can’t be trusted to tell the truth about its Afghanistan disaster.” Issa added that “GOP Foreign Affairs Committee members — including Chairman McCaul — are clear that the offer from Blinken is incomplete and unacceptable.”
The cable in question, sent to Blinken and the State Department's director of policy planning, Salman Ahmed, reportedly warned about the collapse of the Afghan military and a near-term Taliban takeover, urging the State Department to speed up its evacuation planning, do more to deal with the glut of special immigrant visa applications, and help safeguard Afghans who had assisted U.S. forces in the country.
“It is vital to me that we preserve the integrity of that process and that channel, that we not take any steps that could have a chilling effect on the willingness of others to come forward in the future,” Blinken told McCaul in March. He had used the “chilling effect” argument since 2021.
Prominent U.S. military veterans also strongly condemned Blinken’s limitations on sharing the cable.
Marine veteran Chad Robichaux, who helped spearhead a massive private civilian evacuation effort in Afghanistan, told the Washington Examiner that “I believe it should be released to the public. They're hiding information to protect themselves and cover up the decision and the White House and the State Department made to move forward with a withdrawal that was highly advised against by diplomats on the ground.”
Robichaux, who wrote a book about the Afghan evacuation efforts he helped lead, further contended that McCaul “needs to hold Secretary Blinken accountable because we can't set a precedent for this where a secretary of state thinks that they can withhold information from our House.”
Stuart Scheller, a Marine veteran who was relieved of duty after publicly questioning military stewardship over the Afghanistan situation, posed a rhetorical question to the Washington Examiner, asking, “Is it really a surprise” that Blinken “doesn’t want to release more details on his department’s ineptitude?”
Mark Geist, a Marine veteran who was part of the CIA annex security team that fought in the battle of Benghazi in 2012, told the Washington Examiner that “if there’s a redacted Afghanistan cable, they should release it to the American people” and argued that “the only reason to hide the dissent cable from the public is because they’d get slapped for screwing s*** up.”
Geist, the founder of the Shadow Warriors Project, said that he was asking “any and all organizations, specifically veteran organizations, who helped American citizens and allies evacuate from Afghanistan, to join me in a letter demanding these redacted cables from Secretary Blinken.”
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President Joe Biden dismissed the significance of the cable right after Kabul fell.
"We got all kinds of cables, all kinds of advice,” Biden said on Aug. 20, 2021. “I made the decision. The buck stops with me."