Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki has agreed to an interview with the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan after almost a year of back and forth.
Psaki, now an MSNBC host, has agreed to the sitdown sometime this month with the committee, according to a letter from her lawyers obtained by Axios. The interview will happen before Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) releases a report on the operation, which will be sometime before the election in November.
Originally, the Trump administration set a deadline of May 2021 to pull all troops out of Afghanistan, but President Joe Biden delayed the deadline to Sept. 11, 2021. By mid-August, the operation was expedited and the Taliban took over control of the government. In Aug. 26, there was a suicide bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport, where people were being airlifted out of the country, that killed 13 American soldiers and 170 Afghan citizens.
The Foreign Affairs Committee has been probing the details of the operation, including if there were differences between what was being said behind the scenes and what was being told to the public. As press secretary, Psaki was in charge of communicating what was happening inside the administration to the public. McCaul first asked for an interview in May, and she has now agreed, after multiple letters from the chairman, to come in for an interview July 26.
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The White House had been a roadblock in giving Psaki permission to do the interview but last week said, “We will authorize Ms. Psaki to participate in a voluntary transcribed interview accompanied by personal counsel and the White House counsel’s office subject to appropriate terms and conditions for the interview,” according to Axios.
The Washington Examiner has reached out to the Foreign Affairs Committee, McCaul, and Psaki’s lawyer, Emily Loeb.
