House Republicans move to hold Blinken in contempt over Afghanistan testimony

WASHINGTON — Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee are moving Tuesday to hold the Secretary of State’s Antony Blinken in contempt of Congress after a heated argument with the Secretary of the Interior over an appearance to testify at the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Blinken, in a letter to Rep. Michael McCaulR-Texas, said he was “deeply disappointed” in the chairman’s decision to initiate contempt of court proceedings and urged him to find a resolution “in good faith.”

“As I have made clear, I am prepared to testify and have offered several reasonable alternatives to the dates unilaterally demanded by the Committee, in which I carry out the President’s important foreign policy objectives,” Blinken wrote in a letter dated Sunday.

The charge of contempt of Congress is the Ia test in a series of moves by McCaul and others House Republicans over the past 18 months to hold the Biden administration accountable for what they have called a “staggering failure of leadership” after Taliban forces the Afghan capital taken much faster than US intelligence had anticipated, as US troops withdrew in 2021.

“Let the record reflect that I patiently requested and waited for his availability in September for four months,” McCaul said in his opening statement. “But instead of working with me, Secretary Blinken made false promises and accused me of politicizing this important issue.”

McCaul had initially scheduled a hearing for Blinken to testify last Thursday, while the secretary was in Egypt and FranceHe then changed the date to Tuesday, when Blinken attended the annual UN General Assembly meeting of world leaders in New York and attended the presidential meeting. Joe Biden ‘s speech during the hearing.

Like all foreign ministers in the past, Blinken will spend the week in New York holding dozens of meetings with his counterparts on a variety of topics, but this year the focus will be on the situation in the Middle East and the Ukraine-Russia conflict.

Democrats on the committee criticized Republicans’ efforts to reject the proposal as purely partisan.

“It’s not hard for the American people to see this for what it is: political theater,” said the New York representative. Gregory Meeksthe top Democrat on the committee, said in an opening statement: “Yet another attempt to put the name of another senior Biden administration official in negative headlines.”

Last week, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller accused McCaul and the committee of repeatedly requesting hearings on days when they knew Blinken would be unavailable.

McCaul has repeatedly said the department has been “disingenuous” in rejecting repeated requests to choose a September date for Blinken to testify. “If we are forced to hold Secretary Blinken in contempt of Congress, he will have no one to blame but himself,” he said in a statement last week.

Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly the disastrous exodus from Afghanistan in the campaign, where he tried to link it to his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala HarrisSeveral watchdog reviews and a more than 18-month investigation by House Republicans have failed to identify a single instance in which Harris had a specific impact on the withdrawal decision-making process.

Blinken has testified 14 times on Afghanistan, including four times before McCaul’s committee.

Miller said Blinken was willing to testify again if a mutually convenient time could be agreed upon, but he noted that Congress is in recess from the end of this week until after the November elections.

Earlier this month, House Republicans released a damning report on their investigation into the intakewhere the disastrous outcome of America’s Longest War on the Biden Administration while Trump’s role was minimized.

The biased assessment outlined the last months of military and civilian failures following Trump’s February 2020 withdrawal agreement, which allowed the Taliban to seize the country even before the last U.S. officials left on August 30, 2021. The chaotic exodus left many American citizens behind, Afghan allies on the battlefieldwomen activists and others at risk from the Taliban.