House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) subpoenaed Secretary of State Antony Blinken for his “refusal” to testify about the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The committee said the subpoena would hold Blinken in contempt if he does not appear before the committee on September 19. In a statement Tuesday. This comes after more than a year of fighting between the committee and the State Department over documents related to the deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan at the end of August 2021.
“The committee is holding this hearing because the Department of State was at the center of the Afghanistan withdrawal and served as the chief executive officer during the August Non-Combatant Exit Operation (NEO),” McCaul wrote in a letter to Blinken. “As Secretary of State throughout the withdrawal and NEO, you were tasked with leading these efforts and ensuring the safe exit of Americans and our Afghan allies.”
The subpoena came months after McCaul threatened in February to sue Blinken in contempt of court if the State Department continued to conceal subpoenaed documents related to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. McCaul had repeatedly requested the documents as part of a Republican investigation into what he called a “disorderly” withdrawal from the Middle Eastern country.
McCaul postponed amending the contempt resolution against Blinken in March after the secretary of state agreed to turn over the documents months after the committee sent out the subpoenas in July 2023.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Blinken has testified before Congress more than 14 times and that it would not be possible at this time for him to testify on the schedule proposed by the committee.
“This includes four hearings conducted directly before Chairman McCaul's committee, including an earlier hearing focused solely on Afghanistan. During that time, the State Department has provided the Committee with approximately 20,000 pages of State Department records, briefings from multiple senior officials, and worked with the Committee on transcripts of interviews with approximately 15 current and former State Department officials,” Miller said in a statement to The Hill.
Miller said the State Department was opposed to a “reasonable alternative” to comply with McCaul's request for a hearing.
“It is unfortunate that the committee has once again issued unnecessary subpoenas instead of continuing to negotiate in good faith with the Department of State,” he said.
McCaul issued another subpoena seeking classified diplomatic cables about the withdrawal in March 2023. The State Department missed the deadline, previously telling The Hill that Blinken had offered to brief the speaker without providing the actual documents.
McCaul argued that briefings and summaries do not satisfy the requirements of a subpoena and again threatened to hold Blinken in contempt of Congress.
The State Department eventually agreed to allow all committee members access to the diplomatic cables the following month.
Last week marked the third anniversary of the end of the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from the Middle Eastern country, leaving many evacuees and allies in limbo and thousands who were airlifted out of the country with no way to stay in the U.S. permanently because of a backlog of migrants.
