The House Foreign Affairs Committee is threatening to subpoena the State Department as part of a probe into the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, CNN first reported late Thursday.
Republican Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, the committee’s new chairman, requested a trove of documents from the State Department related to the withdrawal with a deadline of Jan. 26, CNN reported. He threatened to subpoena the department if it does not turn over the documents.
“It is imperative that the State Department provide complete responses to these longstanding requests, and the Committee will not tolerate continued delay,” McCaul wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, according to CNN. “In the event of noncompliance, the Committee will use the authorities available to it to enforce these requests as necessary, including through compulsory process.”
Among the questions McCaul reportedly lists in the letter are, “What is the U.S. Government’s current relationship with the Taliban?” and “What are the Administration’s intentions for rescinding and/or reprogramming foreign assistance in Afghanistan?”
While Republicans were in the minority, they sent at least three requests for the documents to the State Department last year, with no response. The Republicans on the committee went ahead and released a report on the withdrawal anyway last year, calling it a “strategic failure.”
McCaul and Blinken had a meeting earlier this week, which State Department Spokesman Ned Price called “constructive.” He would not answer which side had requested the meeting. He also would not directly answer whether the department would turn over the requested documents to the new Republican majority on the committee.
The State Department has not yet released the findings of its own report on the Afghanistan withdrawal, which critics have criticized as hasty and poorly executed, despite reportedly completing it nearly one year ago.
