The House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Democratic leadership is blocking public oversight of the Afghanistan withdrawal, GOP members alleged, prompting a blunt rejoinder from the committee’s chairman.
This morning, committee lawmakers are receiving a briefing from State Department officials on the U.S. government’s handling of Afghanistan from 2017 through last August. But that briefing was slated to take place behind closed doors, and the committee’s majority leadership has made the question and answer portion classified, the committee’s GOP members said in a statement yesterday:
Even though the State Department had a large part of the responsibility for the noncombatant evacuation operation that ultimately resulted in the death of 13 U.S. servicemembers and the abandonment of more than 700 American citizens and tens of thousands of Afghan allies in the Taliban-controlled country, our committee has to date only had one open, full committee hearing with an official from the Biden administration. Holding a closed briefing where the question-and-answer portion is classified at the highest level – even though the vast majority of the information sought should not be classified – is not the transparency the American people deserve.
In addition, the briefing’s question portion was expected take place under one of the highest levels of classification, TS/SCI, according to the statement.
The GOP committee members also alleged that while the State Department offered to make part of the hearing unclassified — therefore enabling members to publicly share information about unclassified portions — the committee’s leadership declined to do so. Asked about this, a department spokesperson only referred National Review to the committee and offered no additional information that could be published.
In an email to NR, a spokesman for Representative Gregory Meeks, the committee chairman, assailed the “patently false” claim by Republican ranking member Michael McCaul that Meeks “was offered and rejected an open session for this briefing.”
“Our conversations with the State Department had not entailed discussions of such an open setting, since the purpose of this briefing is to ensure that Members have access to the most detailed information available — including information that cannot be disclosed in an unclassified setting,” the spokesman wrote, adding that Meeks intends to continue to conduct oversight of the Afghanistan withdrawal in open and closed settings.
Several senior State Department officials are addressing the committee’s lawmakers today. The briefers are expected to include deputy secretary of state for management and resources Brian McKeon, under secretary of state for management John Bass, and State Department counselor Derek Collet, among others. Bass served as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2017-2020, and McKeon, a few months ahead of the withdrawal, reportedly ordered the dismantling of a key State Department bureau that had carried out the evacuation of U.S. citizens from global hotspots.