McCaul demands interviews with officials over State Department subpoena battle

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) is demanding interviews with State Department officials after he said the department failed to turn over subponeaed documents on the U.S. exit from Afghanistan. 

In a letter sent Thursday to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, McCaul said the State Department produced only a “meager 73 pages of significantly duplicative materials” by the subpoena’s deadline of July 25. Issued July 18, the subpoena followed a months-long battle between the committee and the State Department for documents related to the country’s deadly pullout from Afghanistan at the end of August 2021. The repeated requests are part of the Republican’s investigation into the Biden administration’s handling of the chaotic withdrawal.

Punchbowl News was the first to report the letter. 

McCaul requested the State Department hand over the documents by Aug. 16 at 5 p.m. and called for the State Department’s assistant secretary of legislative affairs and acting legal adviser to appear for transcribed interviews no later than Aug. 21. McCaul said the interviews will help the committee “better understand” the department’s “continued failure.” 

McCaul said the Afghanistan After Action Review (AAR) files are “critical” to the committee’s probe into the Afghanistan withdrawal. He noted the AAR was conducted as a 90-day review and the department has now gone longer than that to produce the documents. 

“The AAR files are necessary to inform the Committee’s consideration of potential legislation aimed at helping prevent the catastrophic mistakes of the withdrawal from happening again, including potential provisions of authorizing legislation for the Department,” McCaul wrote, noting the recent evacuation of American citizens at the U.S. Embassy in Sudan demonstrates the “grave urgency” for legislative reform. 

In Thursday’s letter, McCaul references the committee’s repeated attempts for documents, calling the department’s noncompliance “unacceptable.”

“The Department’s anemic subpoena response suggests that it is either deliberately obstructing the Committee’s oversight, or that its document retention, location, and production procedures are astoundingly deficient,” McCaul wrote. 

McCaul also issued a subpoena in late March for a sensitive diplomatic cable on the withdrawal, but the State Department missed the deadline, previously telling The Hill that Blinken offered to brief the chairman without providing the actual document. McCaul pushed back on this argument, claiming a briefing or summary does not satisfy the subpoena. 

Blinken initially told McCaul he was opposed to providing the cable through the State Department’s Dissent Channel to protect the integrity of the channel, which is a communication mechanism that allows diplomats to raise serious concerns over U.S. foreign policy. These concerns are raised directly to the secretary and other senior State Department officials. 

After threatening to hold Blinken in contempt of Congress, the State Department eventually agreed to let all members of the committee view the dissent channel cable.

This story was updated at 3:39 p.m.