Secretary of State Antony Blinken will let the full House Foreign Affairs Committee view a key Afghan dissent cable after being repeatedly threatened with contempt of Congress, a top House chairman revealed on Monday.
Rep. Michael McCaul announced in May that he would be holding a hearing this month to hold Blinken in contempt for defying a congressional subpoena, but the contempt vote was put on hold last month after the State Department caved slightly and allowed McCaul and Rep. Gregory Meeks , the committee’s ranking member, to look at a somewhat redacted version of the July 2021 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, last week. Blinken has now caved further.
McCaul made it clear on Memorial Day that, despite the State Department letting him and Meeks view the dissent cable, contempt for Blinken was on the table if the State Department did not allow all committee members the same opportunity. 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 a suicide bombing by the Islamic State.
McCaul said last week 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...
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.
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