Top House Republican targets Biden — and now Harris — in Afghanistan probe

The House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Republican chair issued a scathing new report Sunday outlining what he views as the Biden administration’s failures on Afghanistan and playing up Vice President Kamala Harris’s role in the chaotic 2021 U.S. withdrawal from the country.

The report from Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) caps a three-year investigation that included contentious public hearings and repeated clashes with senior Biden officials over access to documents. But the probe has previously focused on Biden and top White House and State Department officials around him.

Now Harris is painted as a key player.

The report stresses that the “Biden-Harris administration prioritized the optics of the withdrawal over the security of U.S. personnel on the ground” and “misled and, in some instances, directly lied to the American people at every stage of the withdrawal.”

McCaul in 2022 issued a 115-page interim report on his investigation that referred to Harris by name just twice. The final report, coming four weeks after Harris became the Democratic nominee, mentions her at least 251 times.

Republicans and Democrats have traded blame for the 20-year war’s calamitous end that saw the Taliban take control of the country. While Biden’s administration did execute the withdrawal, it was former President Donald Trump who cut a peace deal with the Taliban in 2020 that included the release of thousands of prisoners and a fixed date for a U.S. exit.

Democrats on the committee say that McCaul’s report downplays Trump’s role and that the Republican is using the investigation as a political tool to hit the Biden administration, a charge McCaul’s team denies.

“With the ascendance of Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, the GOP performance has reached a crescendo,” said the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s ranking member, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.).

Sunday’s report pivots sharply from prior documents by magnifying Harris’s role in Afghanistan policy.

“Vice President Kamala Harris was the last person in the room when President Biden made the decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan; a fact she boasted about shortly after President Biden issued his go-to-zero order,” the report states. “Despite warnings against withdrawing by senior leaders, Vice President Harris’ aide disclosed the vice president ‘strongly supported’ President Biden’s decision. President Biden’s former Chief of Staff Ron Klain affirmed Vice President Harris was entrenched in the president’s Afghanistan policy.”

The report notes that when the evacuation took place in August 2021, Harris was on a trip to Singapore and Vietnam where she pledged the administration would continue to protect Afghan women and children. “Her promise has clearly not been fulfilled,” the report concludes.

Harris and her supporters in Washington have increasingly trumpeted the role she has played in the Biden administration’s foreign policy in the final stretch of the election campaign season, but she has said little on Afghanistan since she was tapped as the Democratic nominee.

Her campaign is hitting back against Republicans by highlighting Trump’s role in setting the stage for the U.S. withdrawal.

“Trump shamelessly attacks the vice president because he hopes he can trick the country into forgetting that his own actions undermined U.S. strategy and put our troops and allies in harm’s way,” Morgan Finkelstein, the campaign’s national security spokesperson, said Saturday..l

Saturday marked the five-year anniversary of Trump’s controversial decision to secretly invite the Taliban to a Camp David summit to negotiate the U.S. withdrawal — a plan he then said he scrapped after a Taliban attack in Kabul.

The White House condemned the report and defended Biden as having made the best of the deal Trump cut with the Taliban to get out of Afghanistan by May of 2021.

White House spokesperson for oversight and investigations Sharon Yang said in a statement that the report was “based on cherry-picked facts, inaccurate characterizations, and pre-existing biases.” She added: “Ending our longest war was the right thing to do and our nation is stronger today as a result.”

McCaul’s report does blame the Trump-appointed U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, for undermining the Afghan government by excluding it from the talks and argues he didn’t keep the U.S. military fully informed about the terms of the negotiations. Khalilzad fired back that the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and then-Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley took part in talks with the Taliban.

“No agreement was made on any military issue without the full knowledge of our military leaders and their participation in decisions made by our leaders,” Khalilzad said in a post responding to a preview of the report.

Meeks issued a rebuttal memo to McCaul’s report. In his 59-page response, Meeks accused McCaul of politicizing the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and taking “particular pains to avoid facts involving former President [Donald] Trump” and his role in setting the stage for the Taliban victory and collapse of the U.S.-support Afghan government before he left office.

As for Harris, he said “Republicans now claim she was the architect of the U.S. withdrawal though she is referenced only three times in 3,288 pages of the Committee’s interview transcripts.”

POLITICO was not able to independently verify Meeks’s claim, as the committee has not publicized all of the interview transcripts from the investigation.

The dueling partisan reports reflect the growing acrimony between the Republicans and Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which has historically been a bastion of bipartisan cooperation on Capitol Hill.

Even as McCaul faces condemnation from Democrats, he has also been criticized as letting some key officials off the hook. Jerry Dunleavy, a former journalist for conservative media outlets, publicly resigned from his job as a senior investigator in the probe, alleging that McCaul wasn’t interested in holding military commanders accountable for what happened or probing Harris and her advisers about their roles.

It’s an open question whether the inquiry into decisions made under Biden’s leadership will transfer into a political liability for Harris.

Biden’s poll numbers tanked three years ago as U.S. forces left Afghanistan, the disorderly pullout from Afghanistan and the Abbey Gate bombing in Kabul that killed 13 U.S. service members. Republicans have since raised the withdrawal as an election-year issue for Biden, and since he exited the presidential race, Harris.

On the third anniversary of the U.S. exit, Trump, speaking at a National Guard group’s conference, described Afghanistan as one in a string of foreign policy failures for Harris and the Biden administration.

“Caused by Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world,” Trump said. “It gave us Russia going into Ukraine. It gave us the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, because it gave us lack of respect.”

But Trump’s push to capitalize politically on the withdrawal has also boomeranged on him. Harris and others have criticized Trump over reports that Trump’s campaign staff got into a confrontation with an official at the Arlington National Cemetery last week. The former president was there for a memorial with families of service members killed at Abbey Gate.

McCaul’s report charges that Biden was determined to withdraw all U.S. forces regardless of whether the Taliban was meeting its end of the deal. The group had pledged to cut ties with terror groups and reduce violence.

McCaul also repeated in his report charges that U.S. officials left behind “a significant amount of classified information” in the U.S. embassy compound during the rushed U.S. evacuation from Kabul as Taliban forces closed in around the Afghan capital. That classified information, McCaul alleges, likely fell into the hands of the Taliban. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment on the matter.

The Republican lawmaker also reiterated accusations that the Biden administration ignored repeated warnings to draw up plans for an emergency evacuation of noncombatants, known as a NEO, in the weeks leading up to the final withdrawal.

“Indeed, testimony obtained by the committee reveals the administration failed to even contemplate a plan for a NEO with the Taliban in control of the country,” the report reads. “This failure is inexcusable in light of warnings from Embassy Kabul personnel and the Defense Department that a Taliban takeover was imminent following the military withdrawal.”