(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) The House Foreign Affairs Committee is preparing to bring down the legal hammer on Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as the State Department refused to release key documents related to the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
According to Daily Mail, the committee sought a specific, classified dissenting cable sent by the department before the Taliban took over the country. The cable contained a warning to the Biden administration, telling them about the “deteriorating” security situation and begging for the evacuation of allies.
The required deadline for the sending of the document was 6 p.m. on May 11. Committee members acknowledged that the agency is “now in violation of its legal obligation to produce these documents.”
“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,” a letter from the committee to Blinken read.
Legal proceedings against Blinken would immediately begin. Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said the committee plans to meet on May 24 to kickstart the affair.
“We’ve given them ample time,” McCaul explained. “Three extensions of time we tried to work this out, but unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that that’s going to work and the next step will be to move to contempt proceedings.”
Initially, the committee will vote to hold the secretary in contempt, and if passed, the matter will move to a full vote by the House of Representatives.
If the vote passed, it would be the first time that the secretary of state’s position was held in contempt. Blinken did not make a statement regarding the document, the deadline or the possible legal ramifications of his inaction.
The committee investigated the Biden administration’s hand in the Afghanistan withdrawal, which took the lives of 13 in the U.S. military and 170 others after a suicide bomber attacked a Kabul airport.
“American people and the veterans and the Gold Star families are right to know what the thinking was in the embassy at the time to take the extraordinary measure to dissent from the policy,” McCaul said.
