A top House Republican is moving closer to holding Secretary of State Antony Blinken in contempt after he again refused to comply with a subpoena demanding the State Department hand over a July 2021 dissent cable from the United States Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has argued since late 2021 that the Biden administration has been stonewalling his investigations into the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
An aide for the House Foreign Affairs Committee told the Washington Examiner on Friday that the State Department “has once again failed to comply with the subpoena,” and so McCaul will now work with his fellow committee members “to pursue holding Secretary Blinken in contempt of Congress.”
McCaul is fed up with Blinken repeatedly refusing to hand over an internal dissent cable that was signed by two dozen U.S. Embassy members in Kabul and sent to the State Department in mid-July 2021, just over a month before the Taliban took Kabul. The dissent cable is known to have criticized the State Department’s planning for the evacuation and warned that Kabul could collapse soon after the U.S. troop withdrawal.
Blinken won’t hand over the cable, despite McCaul’s congressional subpoena in late March, which compelled the State Department to hand over an unredacted version of “the Dissent Channel cable sent on or about July 13, 2021, reportedly signed by 23 State Department officials, and the official response to it.”
McCaul told Blinken in a letter late last week that the subpoena “must be complied with immediately” and warned that “should you fail to comply, 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.”
To hold Blinken in contempt, McCaul’s committee would first need to vote to do so, followed by the entire House. If passed, Blinken would be the first Biden administration official to be held in contempt since the GOP took control of the House in January. The contempt sanction would then be forwarded to the Justice Department to decide whether to charge him.
Contempt of Congress is a misdemeanor with a sentence of up to a year in prison.
