House members will vote this week on a resolution to condemn Biden administration officials for the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan as Republicans continue to push for investigations into the failures that led to 13 U.S. service members’ deaths.
The resolution, introduced by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX), ensures “accountability for key officials in the Biden-Harris administration responsible for decisionmaking and execution failures throughout the withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
The measure condemns a host of people involved in the decision to withdraw from the Middle East, including President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, White House national security communications adviser John Kirby, former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, among others.
The resolution heads to the House Rules Committee for debate, which begins at 4 p.m. Monday and will be voted on as early as Wednesday. It comes after McCaul and the GOP majority on the Foreign Affairs Committee released a lengthy report that highlighted preparation failures and department-level mistakes that led to the deaths of the 13 service members and nearly 200 Afghans.
The report’s release comes ahead of a contentious 2024 election, which polling shows could be anyone’s game. Republicans raced against the political clock to issue the report before the next Congress. Though Biden is no longer the Democratic presidential nominee, the report does seek to tie Harris to the decisions of the commander-in-chief, with the Foreign Affairs Committee staff members noting that they could not find any evidence that she disagreed with his decisions.
“Anyone who reads this report will be able to see that we conducted this investigation with integrity, not drawing conclusion ahead of time but rather looking at the facts and evidence we collected,” McCaul said. “The report is simply a recitation of those facts and evidence. This is not about politics to me — it never has been. It’s about getting to the bottom of what happened so we can make sure it never happens again. And it’s about finding who was responsible for this catastrophe so they can finally, after three long years, be held accountable.”
Meanwhile, Harris and her campaign have sought to place blame on former President Donald Trump and the agreement he reached with the Taliban as a reason for the botched withdrawal. Her campaign told CBS News in early September that Trump and Republicans attack Harris for the withdrawal “because he hopes he can trick the country into forgetting that his own actions put troops in harm’s way.”
Blinken has been subpoenaed to appear before the Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday, however, it is unclear whether he will show up. If Blinken does not arrive for testimony, the committee will hold a markup to hold Blinken in contempt of Congress for ignoring a congressional subpoena.
The congressional contempt report provided ahead of the markup details that Blinken refused to appear for testimony after a subpoena issued Wednesday, superseding a previous subpoena sent on Sept. 3.
The secretary of state and the State Department have been the target of several subpoenas, with both arguing that the department has been cooperative with Republicans’ requests and that subpoenas are unnecessary.
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The committee wrote in the contempt report that the body seeks to “advance the appropriate legislative proposals” to remedy the causes of the withdrawal failures.
“The failures that led to the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan placed Americans at risk and continue to undermine American national security and interests abroad,” the report reads. “Secretary Blinken’s testimony is crucial to guaranteeing the appropriate remedies are instated to rectify the failures that led to the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal and NEO.”