(NewsNation) — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to miss a hearing Tuesday about the nation’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, despite threats to hold him in contempt of Congress.
Last week, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul subpoenaed Blinken to attend the hearing, threatening contempt if he didn’t. The meeting was originally scheduled for 10 a.m. EDT Tuesday. The committee made its livestream for the hearing private about an hour before it was set to begin and posted another stream titled, “Markup to Find Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Contempt of Congress.”
Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., told NewsNation Tuesday morning he doesn’t expect Blinken to attend.
“He’s going to be a no-show,” Burchett said Tuesday on “Morning in America.” “I don’t think he wants to face us. He’s got no excuse. This thing was a disaster.”
Why is Antony Blinken unlikely to attend House hearing?
The State Department lashed at House Republicans over the subpoena earlier this month, accusing them of repeatedly calling for hearings on days they knew Blinken was unavailable.
McCaul said he was trying to accommodate Blinken. He had first set a hearing for Thursday while Blinken was in Egypt and France.
On Tuesday, Blinken is expected to attend the annual U.N. General Assembly gathering of world leaders in New York and listen to President Joe Biden’s speech at the time of the hearing.
It wouldn’t have been the secretary of state’s first time speaking publicly about the six-month withdrawal that began in February 2020. Blinken has testified about Afghanistan 14 times, including four times before McCaul’s committee.
Why did lawmakers plan the Afghanistan withdrawal hearing?
House Republicans issued a report on their investigation into the military withdrawal earlier this month. They alleged — in part — that the Biden-Harris administration “was determined to withdraw from Afghanistan, with or without the Doha Agreement,” also known as the Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan.
The deal was brokered between the Taliban and U.S. when former President Donald Trump was in office and signed in February 2020. It called for the drawdown of U.S. forces from the country and a full withdrawal by May 2021, a timeline Biden vowed to stick to when he took office.
The report also said the Biden-Harris administration failed to prepare for civilian evacuation operations and created an unsafe environment.
As a result, 13 U.S. service members were killed by a terrorist attack on Aug. 26, 2021 — the deadliest day for the U.S. military in Afghanistan since 2012.
Previous investigations and analyses have pointed to a systemic failure spanning the last four presidential administrations and concluded that Biden and Trump share the heaviest blame.
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