Republicans will scorn Antony Blinken for Afghanistan testimony

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee will move to fill the secretary of state position Tuesday Anthony Blinken in contempt of Congress after a contentious back-and-forth with the Cabinet Secretary about an appearance to testify about the chaotic American withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Blinken, in a letter to Rep. Michael McCaulR-Texas said he was “deeply disappointed” in the chairman’s decision to initiate contempt proceedings and urged him to reach a resolution “in good faith.”

“As I have made clear, I am prepared to testify and have offered several reasonable alternatives to the dates unilaterally demanded by the committee on which I will implement the President’s important foreign policy objectives,” Blinken wrote in a statement Sunday letter.

The contempt of Congress impeachment is the ltest in a series of moves by McCaul and others Republicans in the House of Representatives over the past 18 months to hold the Biden administration accountable for what they have called a “stunning failure of leadership” after Taliban forces seized the Afghan capital much faster than U.S. intelligence agencies anticipated when U.S. forces withdrew in 2021.

McCaul had called a hearing last Thursday for the first time in which Blinken could testify while he was the secretary was in Egypt and France. He then changed the date to Tuesday, when Blinken attended the U.N. General Assembly’s annual meeting of world leaders in New York and joined the president. Joe Biden ‘s speech during the hearing.

As all secretaries of state have done in the past, Blinken will spend the week in New York holding dozens of meetings with his counterparts on a variety of issues, but this year the focus will be on the situation in the Middle East and the Ukraine-Russia conflict.

Last week, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller accused McCaul and the committee of repeatedly calling for hearings on days when they knew Blinken would be unavailable to appear.

McCaul said the department was “dishonest” for rejecting repeated requests to choose a September date for Blinken to testify. “If we are forced to hold Secretary Blinken in contempt of Congress, he has no one to blame but himself,” he said in a statement last week.

Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly given the disastrous exodus from Afghanistan in the campaign, trying to link it to his Democratic rival, vice president Kamala Harris. Several watchdog reviews and a more than 18-month investigation by House Republicans have failed to identify a case in which the Harris had a particular impact on withdrawal decision-making.

Blinken has testified on Afghanistan fourteen times, including four times before McCaul’s committee.

Miller said Blinken was willing to testify again if a mutually convenient time could be agreed, but noted that Congress will be in recess from the end of this week until after the November election.

Earlier this month, Republicans in the House of Representatives released a scathing report on their investigation into the intakewhere he predicted the disastrous outcome America’s Longest War on the Biden administration while minimizing Trump’s role.

The partisan assessment outlined the final months of military and civilian failures following Trump’s withdrawal deal in February 2020, which allowed the Taliban to seize the country before the last US officials left on August 30, 2021. American citizens, Afghan allies on the battlefieldfemale activists and others in danger from the Taliban.