In response to a request from House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul, Secretary of State Antony Blinken withheld eight crucial documents pertaining to the pullout from Afghanistan, as Just The News has revealed. Foreign policy pundits like retired Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) referred to the pullout as “disastrous.”
According to a committee source, the State Department sent over 300 papers to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday, but it didn’t seem to contain the eight that McCaul had asked for in unredacted form in his letter to Blinken on August 9. Tuesday was the cutoff day for supplying those.
A number of memos from Todd Brown, the Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security, which McCaul said are mentioned in the Afghanistan After-Action Review (AAR), were among the sought materials. In a statement on August 10, McCaul stated, “The AAR files are necessary to inform the Committee’s consideration of potential legislation aimed at helping prevent the catastrophic mistakes of the withdrawal from happening again.”
“The Department’s anemic subpoena response suggests that it is either deliberately obstructing the Committee’s oversight, or that its document retention, location, and production procedures are astoundingly deficient. Neither is acceptable,” McCaul wrote in the August 9 letter.
This week, the department released 300 documents to the committee; however, a committee source informed Just The News that the majority of the material in them was previously public knowledge.
McCaul expressed his satisfaction with the department’s response to his request for the extra 300 records, and he hopes that this kind of frequent cooperation will continue.
“After a call with Secretary Blinken where he promised more regular production of documents, the State Department released another 300 pages of documents related into our investigation into the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. I appreciate the secretary’s commitment to me to provide more regular document production going forward and hope he is true to his word on that,” McCaul said. “Time is of the essence and we owe our veterans and our Gold Star families answers.”
In addition, McCaul has vowed to press the Biden administration for additional information regarding the attack that claimed the lives of 170 Afghans and 13 US members during the disorganized evacuation from what the White House dubbed “Operation Freedom’s Sentinel.” He stated that although a request for a preemptive American airstrike was turned down, U.S. intelligence was aware that ISIS was organizing an attack to kill Americans in Afghanistan, according to a report.
“I will not rest until we get answers and accountability as to what happened,” McCaul said. “How did this go so wrong?”
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