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 (R-TX) 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 (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, Afghanistan, last week. Blinken has now caved further.
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McCaul said Monday that, thanks to the “unprecedented” action by Blinken, the subpoena would be considered satisfied, and contempt would now be off the table because the secretary of state agreed to allow all of the members of the committee to look at the dissent cable.
“This is an unprecedented step forward in our committee’s investigation into the Afghanistan withdrawal,” McCaul said Monday. “For the first time in history, the State Department has agreed to allow Congress to view a dissent channel cable. This cable contains first-hand information from Embassy Kabul employees who were on the ground prior to the collapse as well as Secretary Blinken’s response to their concerns. I want to thank Secretary Blinken for negotiating with me in good faith on this.”
The dissent 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.
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.
GOP members of the committee, many of them veterans of the war in Afghanistan, told the Washington Examiner last month that the prior concession by Blinken was not nearly good enough, and McCaul agreed in his letter last week.
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 last month that Blinken’s previous 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 a suicide bombing by the Islamic State.
McCaul told Blinken last week the State Department’s prior limitation “obstructs” congressional oversight and his desire to pass legislation to prevent “similar catastrophes” in the future, and he set a Friday 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 last week. “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 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 inadequate.”
The House chairman added last week 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.
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 a 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.”
