A top House Republican has threatened former White House press secretary Jen Psaki with a subpoena if she does not voluntarily testify before Congress about President Joe Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The 2021 sudden and chaotic exit from the country ended in the deaths of 13 U.S. service members and billions of dollars in weapons ending up in the hands of terrorists.
Republican Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is investigating the country’s end to the two-decade war in Afghanistan.
According to Axios, he has sought to hear Psaki’s side of the colossal military and leadership failure, but she has declined to speak with his committee since last September.
When she claimed falsely in her new book released this month that her then-boss, President Joe Biden, never looked at his watch during the dignified transfer of remains of some of the killed U.S. service members, McCaul renewed a push to speak with Psaki.
In a letter addressed to both the now-MSNBC anchor and her attorney Emily Loeb this week, McCaul demanded accountability and transparency.
“As a private citizen, willing and able to publish a memoir on her tenure as White House Press Secretary, I encourage Ms. Psaki to refrain from relying on thin legal arguments to dodge her responsibility to appear before Congress,” McCaul wrote in his letter.
“The Committee will not tolerate Ms. Psaki’s continued obstruction of its critical investigation,” he added.
The Texas Republican concluded he felt Psaki was making an attempt to cash in on the deaths of American soldiers by publishing the book “Say More: Lessons from Work, the White House, and the World.”
Should Jen Psaki be subpoenaed?
Psaki had already updated the ebook to retract a false claim that Biden did not look at his watch multiple times in 2021 as the president met with the family members of dead American service members killed at the airport in Kabul when U.S. forces scrambled for the exits.
“It is troubling that Ms. Psaki seeks to profit off the Afghanistan tragedy, and has felt comfortable writing accounts and making them available to the general public, but refuses to make herself available to Congress,” McCaul wrote, Axios reported.
Axios concluded McCaul threatened Psaki with a subpoena in the letter.
In remarks earlier this year on the investigation into the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal, McCaul stated that “nothing was done” by the Pentagon or White House when intelligence experts warned them that conditions in the country were deteriorating before the scheduled exit date of the military.
“Instead, our investigation uncovered the White House refused to listen to warnings about the situation on the ground,” he added.
“People all over the world watched as babies were flung over barbed wire fence[s] by mothers without hope, desperate Afghans fell to their deaths from airplanes, and hordes of people surrounded the airport as they tried to flee for their lives,” McCaul also said.
When addressing family members of the U.S. service members killed at the Kabul airport, McCaul said, “I will not rest until I get to the bottom of this tragedy. You deserve answers. The American people deserve answers.”
The congressman concluded by saying that the sacrifices of the troops would not be forgotten, even though, as he said, “The president has never publicly stated the names of your children.”
McCaul is seeking to release a report about the exit from Afghanistan by the end of the summer, Axios reported.
