The chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, Republican Michael McCaul, said in a letter that “insufficient” information has been provided by the State Department on a telegram in which several diplomats warned of the takeover of Kabul by the Taliban when the North America withdrawal is complete.
McCaul has given Blinken until May 11 to provide the necessary information or he will file a lawsuit in Congress for contempt.
A State Department spokesman said today that the Republican move in the House of Representatives is “unnecessary and unimportant.”
“It is regrettable that the House Foreign Affairs Committee is proceeding with this unnecessary and trivial initiative, despite having received a confidential cable report as well as a written summary,” the US diplomacy spokesman said.
The State Department assures that it will provide Congress with “the information it needs to do its job and protect the employees” of that agency.
The Republican opposition — which has held a majority in the House of Representatives since last January — has opened an investigation into the complex military withdrawal from Afghanistan conducted by the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden in the summer of 2021.
At the heart of the investigation is a telegram Blinken refuses to release, in which US diplomats in Kabul warned that the Taliban would take over the city if the withdrawal was completed.
This type of telegram is a mechanism introduced in 1971, during the Vietnam War, to allow members of the U.S. diplomatic services to criticize government policies when they disagree with them, without running the risk of being this would become public.
Source: DN
