The Department of State announced on Wednesday that it will allow a top House Republican to look at a July 2021 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan after the GOP moved toward holding Secretary of State Antony Blinken in contempt over his refusal to make the document available.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and his allies had 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.
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For months, Blinken wouldn’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 message and the official response to it.
McCaul announced on Wednesday that his committee would be holding a contempt hearing for Blinken next month, and the State Department responded by announcing during a press conference that it would let McCaul and his Democratic counterpart, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), review the cable behind closed doors with some redactions.
“In our letter to the committee today, we will invite Chairman McCaul and Ranking Member Meeks to view the dissent channel cable here at the State Department, in camera, with appropriate personal information redacted,” State Department principal deputy spokesman Vedant Patel said Wednesday afternoon. “Chairman McCaul himself has said that this is what he is interested in and so it is our sincere hope that our offer here will sufficiently satisfy their request for information.”
McCaul had also demanded that the State Department hand over Blinken’s summer 2021 response to the cable, but Patel said he didn’t know if that was included in the offer to McCaul, telling reporters, “I’ll have to check on the specifics on that … but we’ll get back to you on that piece.”
The House Republican has argued since late 2021 that the Biden administration has been stonewalling his 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 announced earlier Wednesday that 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.”
Contempt of Congress is a misdemeanor.
The Washington Examiner reached out to McCaul to see if he's satisfied with the State Department's offer.
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.
McCaul’s demands of Blinken come as the secretary of state is also under fire related to the Hunter Biden saga.
Mike Morell, a former Obama CIA acting director, recently told the House that Blinken “triggered” him to write an October 2020 letter denouncing the Hunter Biden laptop story as a hoax likely perpetrated by Russia.
Blinken has also been accused of lying under oath in December 2020 testimony to the Senate in which he falsely claimed that he had not exchanged emails with Hunter Biden while Blinken was Obama’s deputy secretary of state.
President Joe Biden dismissed the significance of the cable right after Kabul fell.
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"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."
Blinken said in September 2021 that the cable expressed “real concerns” about the durability of the Afghan government forces after the U.S. left and called on the State Department to speed up the special immigrant visa process.