Blinken faces contempt of Congress for defying Afghanistan dissent cable subpoena
Jerry Dunleavy
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A top House Republican is threatening to hold Secretary of State Antony Blinken in contempt because he has refused to comply with a subpoena demanding the State Department hand over a July 2021 dissent cable from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has argued since late 2021 that the Biden administration has been stonewalling his 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 an ISIS-K suicide bombing.
SENATORS DEMAND BLINKEN HAND OVER HUNTER BIDEN INFO AFTER “FALSE TESTIMONY”
McCaul is fed up with Blinken repeatedly refusing to hand over an internal dissent cable which was signed by two dozen U.S. embassy members in Kabul and sent to the State Department in mid-July 2021, just over a month before the Taliban took Kabul. The dissent cable is known to have criticized the State Department’s planning for the evacuation and warned that Kabul could collapse soon after the U.S. troop withdrawal.
Blinken won’t hand over the cable, despite McCaul’s congressional subpoena in late March, which compelled the State Department to hand over an unredacted version of “the Dissent Channel cable sent on or about July 13, 2021, reportedly signed by 23 State Department officials, and the official response to it.”
McCaul told Blinken in a Friday letter that the subpoena “must be complied with immediately” and warned that “should you fail to comply, the Committee is prepared to take the necessary steps to enforce its subpoena, including holding you in contempt of Congress and/or initiating a civil enforcement proceeding.”
To hold Blinken in contempt, McCaul’s committee would first need to vote to do so, followed by the entire House. If passed, Blinken would be the first Biden administration official to be held in contempt since the GOP took control of the House in January. The contempt sanction would then be forwarded to the Biden Justice Department to decide whether to charge him.
Contempt of Congress is a potential misdemeanor with a sentence of up to a year in prison.
McCaul said Friday that the State Department had provided “a roughly one-page summary of the dissent cable” as well as a summary of the State Department’s “official response” to it that was “just under one page in length.” McCaul said that the State Department “has confirmed that the original dissent cable totaled four pages in length, meaning that the summary represented a 75% reduction of the original cable.”
The congressman said a State Department briefing on April 27 was “insufficient” to satisfy the March 28 subpoena. The briefers were “unable or unwilling” to provide basic information and made “multiple inaccurate statements” about the use of the Dissent Channel, McCaul said.
Citing multiple extensions he’d given the State Department previously, McCaul set a new deadline of May 11 for Blinken to comply.
“State Department officials at the embassy in Kabul took the extraordinary measure to raise their dissent to the policy, sir, that you and your administration were effectuating. I think the American people need to see this. We need to know what their dissent was — why were they objecting to your policy in the failed withdrawal from Afghanistan?” McCaul told Blinken during a hearing in March shortly before he issued the subpoena.
The summer 2021 dissent cable, 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 potential near-term Taliban takeover, urging the State Department to speed up its evacuation planning, to do more to deal with the glut of special immigrant visa applications, and to help keep safe those who had assisted the United States in Afghanistan.
“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’s demands of Blinken come as the secretary of state is also under fire related to the Hunter Biden saga.
Mike Morell, a former Obama CIA acting director, recently told the House that Blinken “triggered” him to write the infamous October 2020 Hunter Biden laptop letter, which baselessly claimed Russian involvement in the New York Post stories about President Joe Biden’s son.
Blinken has also been accused of lying under oath in December 2020 testimony to the Senate where he falsely claimed that he had not exchanged emails with Hunter Biden while Blinken was Obama’s deputy secretary of state.
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, adding, “I made the decision. The buck stops with me.”
Blinken said in September 2021 that the cable expressed “real concerns” about the durability of the Afghan government forces after the U.S. left and called on the State Department to speed up the special immigrant visa process.
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If Blinken is held in contempt of Congress, he would join the ranks of former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder who in 2012 refused to hand over records on the Justice Department’s handling of the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal as well as Lois Lerner, who was held in contempt in 2014 for helping lead an IRS effort targeting conservative Tea Party groups and other similar nonprofits. The Obama Justice Department declined to charge Holder and Lerner.
More recently, four Trump allies were held in contempt of Congress when Democrats controlled the House over not cooperating with the now-defunct House Jan. 6 select committee on the Capitol riot. The Biden Justice Department declined to charge former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former Trump social media director Dan Scavino, but it did indict trade adviser Peter Navarro and Trump ally Steve Bannon. Navarro’s trial has yet to happen but Bannon was convicted.