According to a committee aide, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul, electronically transmitted a subpoena to the State Department on Tuesday morning for a dissent cable written by US diplomats serving in Afghanistan prior to the US withdrawal from the country.
According to the aide, the subpoena will be physically delivered to the State Department later on Tuesday.
The subpoena comes after months of McCaul requesting the dissent cable, which his team believes as critical material as they investigate the Biden administration’s departure from Afghanistan. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the committee that he was opposed to disclosing the paper because he was afraid that it would discourage diplomats from using the channel, which is a confidential mechanism for them to discuss concerns with high State Department officials.
Republican legislators have slammed the withdrawal’s frantic final weeks, during which a suicide bomber assaulted Kabul airport and killed 13 US service members and more than 100 Afghans.
The classified cable was sent to Blinken in mid-July 2021, warning that the department needed to take swift action, such as quickly processing and evacuating Afghans who had assisted the US from the country, because they believed the situation in Afghanistan would rapidly deteriorate and they feared a disaster.
“We made numerous good faith efforts to find common ground so that we could see this key piece of information.” Regrettably, Secretary Blinken has refused to release the Dissent Cable and his answer, prompting me to initiate my first subpoena as chairman of this committee,” McCaul stated.
However, the State Department has opposed the committee’s efforts to obtain the cable and has not signalled that it will comply with the subpoena promptly, perhaps resulting in a judicial struggle between the two parties.
“The Department followed up with the Committee to express its willingness to deliver a briefing on the Committee’s concerns and the issues noted by Embassy Kabul, including through the dissident route.” Instead, the Committee issued a subpoena,” stated senior Deputy Spokesman Vedant Patel. “The Department remains committed to providing the Committee with the information it requires to carry out its oversight job, and has already provided the Committee with thousands of pages of papers in response to its request.”
McCaul has frequently threatened to issue a subpoena if the State Department does not provide three priority items: the cable, the after-action report on the departure, and the embassy evacuation plans. Last week, a committee staffer stated that the final item had been received, and Blinken stated that the after-action report would be delivered to Congress in the coming weeks.
