A GOP chairman will “revisit” holding Secretary of State Antony Blinken in contempt of Congress if he refuses to let the full House Foreign Affairs Committee view a key Afghan dissent cable.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) announced in May that he would be holding a hearing this month to hold Blinken in contempt for defying the congressional subpoena, but the contempt vote was put on hold after the State Department caved slightly and allowed McCaul and Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the committee’s ranking member, to look at a somewhat redacted version of the July 2021 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul last Tuesday.
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Yet McCaul made it clear on Memorial Day that contempt for Blinken was still on the table if the State Department does not allow all committee members the same opportunity. The cable is known to have criticized the State Department’s planning for the Afghanistan evacuation and warned that Kabul could collapse soon after the United States moved to withdraw its troops.
The House chairman said “providing this access” to himself and Meeks “was the right decision” by the State Department but that it wasn’t enough and that the only accommodation “necessary to satisfy the subpoena is for the Department to provide all Committee Members access to the documents” as soon as possible.
GOP members of the committee, many of them veterans of the war in Afghanistan, told the Washington Examiner last week that the concession by Blinken is not nearly good enough, and McCaul agreed in his new letter.
Darin Hoover, the father of Staff Sgt. Darin Taylor Hoover, one of the 13 U.S. service members killed at Abbey Gate, told the Washington Examiner that Blinken’s deal to limit the viewing of the cable to two members of Congress was “bullcrap.”
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.
McCaul told Blinken on Monday that the State Department’s limitation “obstructs” congressional oversight and his desire to pass legislation to prevent “similar catastrophes” in the future, and he set a June 9 deadline for the State Department to allow all members to view the dissent cable.
“While I paused efforts to enforce the Committee’s subpoena pending my review of the documents, I did so with the express stipulations that the subpoena remains in full force and effect, and that acceptance of this accommodation did not waive any of the Committee’s rights,” McCaul said. “Should the Department continue to refuse to provide the entire Committee the same opportunity Ranking Member Meeks and I had to review these documents, I will need to revisit my current position.”
McCaul said that reading the dissent cable “has significantly enhanced my understanding of the deteriorating conditions on the ground in Afghanistan and the direness of the dissenting officials’ warnings to the Department’s leadership” and that the cable “makes clear the remarkable extent to which the dissenters accurately predicted the situation on the ground and the Department’s course of action in Afghanistan, and that the Department’s actions taken in response were grossly inadequate.”
The House chairman added that “it is essential that every one of the Committee’s Members — Democrat and Republican — have the same opportunity that Ranking Member Meeks and I did” to review the dissent cable.
“The Department waited nearly two years after the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal to provide just two Members of Congress with access to documents showing the dire warnings by career officials that went unheeded, with tragic consequences,” McCaul told Blinken. “I strongly urge you to do the right thing and provide access to the documents to all Committee members and to the American people. On this Memorial Day, all Americans — particularly Afghanistan veterans and Gold Star families — deserve a full and complete accounting of the Administration’s actions.”
McCaul previously announced his committee would consider a resolution to hold Blinken in contempt on May 24. The proposed resolution recommended that the House find Blinken “in contempt of Congress for refusal to comply with a subpoena duly issued by the Committee on Foreign Affairs.”
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 has used the “chilling effect” argument since 2021.
McCaul shot down this “chilling effect” argument in his Memorial Day letter to Blinken, arguing that “if brave and dedicated officials are disincentivized to provide their honest and candid assessments in future communications with Department leadership, it will be because the Administration failed to heed their warnings in July 2021 and not because Congress seeks a full accounting for the American people.”
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President Joe Biden dismissed the significance of the dissent 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."