House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) announced Thursday that the committee would hold a markup on a resolution to hold Secretary of State Antony Blinken in contempt of Congress.
The markup is planned for March 7, with the announcement coming just days after McCaul renewed his threat to hold Blinken in contempt while the State Department “continues to withhold” subpoenaed documents on the United States’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
“It has been nearly 14 months since we first requested these documents that are critical to our investigation in the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan,” McCaul said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “The ball is in the secretary’s court — if he wants to avoid being the first secretary of state in history to be held in contempt of Congress, he can provide these documents.”
The committee and Blinken have been locked in a battle for over a year over the documents relating to what McCaul called a “chaotic” withdrawal that cost the lives of roughly 170 people, including 13 U.S. service members during a terrorist attack from the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate. Though U.S. forces evacuated more than 120,000 people, thousands of U.S. citizens and Afghans working with the U.S. during the two decades of war between the countries were left behind.
“We recognize the committee’s legitimate oversight function, and that’s why we have supplied them with thousands of pages of documents,” State Department spokesman Max Miller said during a press conference on Thursday. “It’s why we have made people available for transcribed interviews. As you know, we have gotten — we have come to kind of loggerheads at certain points in the past and been able to reach a resolution, and that’s what we’ll try to do here.”
The House Foreign Affairs Committee launched an investigation soon after Republicans assumed the majority in 2023 to look into decisions made during the weeks and months leading up to the withdrawal. The committee conducted over 15 transcribed interviews between June and December, and McCaul has sent Blinken and the State Department numerous subpoenas for materials.
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A subpoena was issued in March asking for a sensitive diplomatic cable on the withdrawal, but the State Department missed the deadline. The department eventually agreed to let all the committee members view the dissent cable, a channel that allows diplomats to raise concerns about U.S. foreign policy, in June.
In May, the department held a classified briefing for the committee, but McCaul had said that a briefing was insufficient. In August, he claimed the State Department only provided a “meager 73 pages of significantly duplicative materials” by a July subpoena date.
