WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department blasted House Republicans on Thursday over a challenge to testify on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, accusing them of holding repeated hearings on days they knew Secretary of State Antony Blinken was not there.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul said he would try to accommodate Blinken, who risks being held in contempt of Congress if he does not appear.
The Texas Republican had first set the hearing for Thursday, while Blinken was in Egypt and France. He then changed the date to Tuesday, when Blinken will be at the UN General Assembly’s annual meeting of world leaders in New York and attend a speech by President Joe Biden at the time of the hearing.
“They have unilaterally chosen a date when we have told them in advance that he will not be in Washington because he will be elsewhere holding important meetings to advance US foreign policy interests,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller. quoth.
He said the State Department told the committee weeks in advance of Blinken’s schedule, so “it doesn’t look very much like they’re acting in good faith.”
McCaul said the department was “misguided” because it had rejected repeated requests to pick a date in September for Blinken to testify. “If we find Secretary Blinken in contempt of Congress, he has no one to blame but himself,” the Republican committee chairman said in a statement Thursday.
Blinken’s testimony is the latest in a series of moves by McCaul and other House Republicans over the past 18 months to hold the Biden administration accountable for what they have called a “stunning failure of leadership” since Taliban forces seized the far-flung Afghan capital. faster than US intelligence had anticipated as American forces withdrew.
Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly brought up the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal on the campaign trail, trying to tie it to Democratic challenger Kamala Harris. Multiple watchdog reviews and more than 18 months of investigations by House Republicans have found no instance in which the vice president had any particular influence on the withdrawal decision.
Blinken has testified about Afghanistan 14 times, including four times to the McCaul committee.
Miller said Blinken would be willing to testify again if a mutually convenient time could be arranged, but noted that Congress will be in recess through the end of next week after the November election.
Earlier this month, House Republicans released a scathing report on their withdrawal investigation, blaming the Biden administration for the disastrous end to America’s longest war and minimizing Trump’s role.
The partisan review described the last months of military and civilian failures since Trump’s February 2020 withdrawal deal, which allowed the Taliban to take over the country even before the last US officials flew out on August 30, 2021. The chaotic exodus left many US citizens, Afghan battlefield allies, women activists and others at risk from the Taliban. those
The report did little to break new ground, as the withdrawal has been exhaustively covered by a number of independent assessments. Previous studies and analyzes have pointed to a systemic failure that spanned the last four presidential administrations and concluded that Biden and Trump share the biggest cause.
McCaul, who led the investigation, said the GOP review revealed that the Biden administration had “the information and the ability to take the necessary steps to engineer the inevitable collapse of the Afghan government so that we could safely evacuate US personnel, US citizens and green card holders and our brave Afghan allies.”
