State Department Faces Deadline to Provide Documents on Afghanistan Withdrawal

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken speaks on the release of the 2022 Human Rights Report at the U.S. State Department in Washington, on March 20, 2023. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Michael McCaul sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, following up on previous requests and emphasizing the need for the State Department to produce requested documents regarding the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

In the letter submitted to Blinken on March 20, McCaul stated that the State Department must send at least three requested documents by the end of the day on March 22. This came in response to the request from the State Department to identify the materials deemed most significant to the committee’s oversight responsibilities.

The request coincides with Blinken’s scheduled appearance before the committee on Thursday to discuss President Joe Biden’s 2024 budget request.

McCaul emphasizes that the committee will issue a subpoena if these materials are not produced prior to Blinken’s March 23 testimony.

The recent letter follows a protracted series of inquiries from the committee. McCaul filed a comprehensive document request on Jan. 12, regarding the pullout, with many of the requests dated back to August 2021, as outlined in the committee’s recent press release.

On March 3, McCaul sent a follow-up letter regarding the department’s continued failure to comply with the committee’s requests, demanding the immediate production of three specific priority items and emphasizing that if the department did not comply, the committee would proceed with the compulsory process.

“From its broader January 12 request, the Committee identified on January 30 three highly specific immediate priority items that are well-known to the Department,” the chairman wrote.

“All of the items specified on March 3 could be produced extremely quickly if they were genuinely prioritized by the Department. The Committee routinely receives highly classified documents and information from the Department on the most sensitive issues confronting U.S. foreign policy, including ongoing threats posed by foreign adversaries. A ‘diligent’ process working in good faith to produce these documents ‘as soon as practicable’ would have produced them long ago.”

State Department Principal Deputy Spokesperson Patel addressed the committee’s request during their March 21 Department press briefing, saying they are provided “hundreds of pages of documents” and that they will continue to do so.

Patel said he was not prepared to answer whether the department would provide the three specific documents most urgently requested by the committee by end of day on March 22.

Critics have accused the U.S. intelligence community and the Biden administration of failing to see the warning signs that the internationally supported government in Kabul would collapse and also of having little to no evacuation plan in place.

A suicide bomb at the international airport in Kabul that killed 13 American service personnel and injured dozens of others was considered a major security failure on the part of the administration.

“Over 18 months after the fall of Kabul, numerous key questions about the withdrawal remain unanswered,” McCaul wrote in his letter.

“The Committee has an obligation to investigate how these grievous failures occurred and determine what actions, including potential legislation, are necessary to help prevent a similar catastrophe from occurring again in the future.”

The Department of State did not immediately respond to The Epoch Times’s request for comment.