Secretary of State Antony Blinken has missed another deadline. He was supposed to turn over a document from the Kabul embassy staff that warned the Biden administration that its Afghanistan withdrawal was going to devolve into an absolute nightmare. But, Biden assured us the evacuation went off without a hitch as long as you don’t consider 13 dead Marines and thousands of Americans left behind or even the $80 billion in weapons he abandoned.
The House GOP has adults in charge now, so instead of whining about it, they plan to charge Anthony Blinken with contempt of Congress charges. A classified memo was sent on July 13, 2021, to Blinken and Director of Policy Planning Salman Ahmed. This was prior to Biden’s disastrous plan to withdraw from Afghanistan. The memo alleged said that the Afghan government was about to collapse and that the Taliban was ready to step in and take over. The memo also asked the State Department to quit the use of sanitized language that covered up the atrocities of the Taliban.
Before the withdrawal, Joe Biden told Americans that a Taliban takeover was very unlikely.
Blinken and the Biden State Department ultimately determined that the democratically elected representatives of the American people only deserved to see summaries of the memo.
Having found these summaries “insufficient to satisfy the committee’s subpoena” and noting that the “Department is now in violation of its legal obligation,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) stressed in a May 5 letter to Blinken that the subpoena “compels you to produce in unredacted form ‘the Dissent Channel cable” and “must be complied with immediately.”
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL“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,” McCaul warned.
Blinken and his department were given a final deadline: May 11, 2023, at 6:00 p.m..
It appears as though Blinken once again has opted for concealment.
State Department spokesman Vedant Patel indicated just ahead of the deadline:
“We will continue to engage with the House Foreign Affairs Committee and discuss with them on their requests. As I have said before, the department has already offered a classified briefing and a summary of the dissent channel cable, as well as the department’s response.”
“We believe that this information has been sufficient to meet what the committee has requested thus far.”
McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told the Daily Mail Thursday:
“We’ve given them ample time. Three extensions of time we tried to work this out, but unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that that’s going to work and the next step will be to move to contempt proceedings.”
“We plan to have a meeting of my committee on May 24 to hold the secretary in contempt and move that to the floor for a full vote by the House of Representatives.”
Before you get all excited, you should understand how this works. First, the committee requesting the information would vote on whether to find Blinken in contempt of Congress. It will pass there and then would go to the floor for a vote of the entire House. It should pass there and then here is where it all falls apart. The House can only recommend the charges. The decision to actually prosecute is up to Merrick Garland. The charge carries a one-year prison sentence.
