President Biden’s administration failed to heed certain warnings from US officials on the ground prior to withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Republican chair of Congress’s House Foreign Affairs Committee, has said.
Michael McCaul, who has recently been granted access to State Department documents, known as dissent cables, detailing concerns of diplomats at the US embassy in Kabul had before withdrawal, according to Fox News, told Punchbowl News that “The dissenters were absolutely right about everything they said, and it was a warning to the administration about what was going to happen and what they needed to do.”
The diplomats, Michael McCaul said “deserve a medal”. “Unfortunately, the administration didn’t heed all their warnings and we got what we got,” he added.
After repeated calls and threats of subpoena the State Department has only allowed a redacted version of the documents to be seen by a select number of people in Congress.
Earlier in May, Michael McCaul said that he will hold Antony Blinken in contempt of Congress if he didn’t make the documents available to his committee, which has been investigating the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Democratic Congressman Greg Meeks, the ranking member of the committee, who has also seen the documents, said that the documents do not reveal any new information and “puts to rest this whole thing about having a subpoena and the president is hiding something or whatever it is.”
