A top House Republican is moving closer to holding Secretary of State Antony Blinken in contempt after he again refused to comply with a subpoena demanding the State Department hand over a July 2021 dissent cable from the United States Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has argued since late 2021 that the Biden administration has been stonewalling his investigations into the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
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An aide for the House Foreign Affairs Committee told the Washington Examiner on Friday that the State Department “has once again failed to comply with the subpoena,” and so McCaul will now work with his fellow committee members “to pursue holding Secretary Blinken in contempt of Congress.”
McCaul is fed up with Blinken repeatedly refusing to hand over an internal dissent cable that was signed by two dozen U.S. Embassy members in Kabul and sent to the State Department in mid-July 2021, just over a month before the Taliban took Kabul. The dissent cable is known to have criticized the State Department’s planning for the evacuation and warned that Kabul could collapse soon after the U.S. troop withdrawal.
Blinken won’t hand over the cable, despite McCaul’s congressional subpoena in late March, which compelled the State Department to hand over an unredacted version of “the Dissent Channel cable sent on or about July 13, 2021, reportedly signed by 23 State Department officials, and the official response to it.”
McCaul told Blinken in a letter late last week that the subpoena “must be complied with immediately” and warned that “should you fail to comply, the Committee is prepared to take the necessary steps to enforce its subpoena, including holding you in contempt of Congress and/or initiating a civil enforcement proceeding.”
To hold Blinken in contempt, McCaul’s committee would first need to vote to do so, followed by the entire House. If passed, Blinken would be the first Biden administration official to be held in contempt since the GOP took control of the House in January. The contempt sanction would then be forwarded to the Justice Department to decide whether to charge him.
Contempt of Congress is a misdemeanor with a sentence of up to a year in prison.
The summer 2021 dissent cable, 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, to do more to deal with the glut of special immigrant visa applications, and to help keep safe those who had assisted the United States in Afghanistan.
“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 has used the “chilling effect” argument since 2021.
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“The committee has been more than reasonable in providing the State Department time to comply with my subpoena, as legally obligated,” McCaul told the Washington Examiner on Thursday. “If the department fails to do so, I am prepared to initiate contempt proceedings. This is not a decision I take lightly, but Congress and the American people, particularly our veterans and Gold Star Families, deserve answers on this catastrophic withdrawal.”
State Department spokesman Vedant Patel lamented earlier this week that “it's unfortunate that despite having received a classified briefing on the dissent channel cable as well as a written summary, that the House Foreign Affairs Committee continues to pursue this unnecessary and unproductive action.”