Republicans Accuse Biden Team of Lying About Afghan Pullout

Daniel Flatley and Tony Capaccio
·3-min read

(Bloomberg) -- Republican lawmakers accused the Biden administration of lying to Americans and sacrificing the safety of US soldiers during the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, in a report that sought to implicate Vice President Kamala Harris before the presidential election.

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The report said President Joe Biden’s team “misled and, in some instances, directly lied to the American people at every stage of the withdrawal.” The administration’s failures led directly to the killing of 13 American troops in a bomb blast at Abbey Gate in Kabul, it said.

The findings are the culmination of a two-year investigation by Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, who has long criticized Biden’s handling of the withdrawal. The report was released two days before Harris is set to debate former President Donald Trump, whose campaign has said the withdrawal weakened the US standing in the world and emboldened Russia to invade Ukraine.

No Democrats signed on to the report, and Representative Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee led by McCaul, said it was a partisan effort to tarnish Harris. He said it omitted key findings from witness interviews, including that the US would have faced “renewed combat with the Taliban had we not continued the withdrawal.”

The nearly 350 page document referred to the “Biden-Harris administration” more than 230 times.

“This report proves senior Biden-Harris administration officials were willfully blind to warnings about the degrading security situation on the ground,” it said. “The investigation upends the Biden-Harris administration’s continued claim that they ‘planned for all contingencies.’”

On Monday, State Department spokesman Vedant Patel criticized the Republican report as a political exercise filled with “cherry-picked” quotes from interviews with senior US officials. He said the US was stronger because of Biden’s decision to end America’s longest war.

“It’s about scoring political points,” Patel told reporters at the department’s regular briefing. He said the investigation had a chance to be bipartisan and recommend real policy solutions, but that the Republican majority “chose to seek scandal over substance.”

Harris’ team has sought to tread carefully around the withdrawal and she hasn’t spoken in detail about her involvement with the decision to leave Afghanistan. In a 2021 interview with CNN, she replied “yes” when asked if she was the “the last person in the room” before Biden made the decision.

McCaul denied that the report’s timing was politically motivated. Speaking to CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, he faulted the administration for any delays and said his probe would continue “well after the election.”

“It’s taken me two years to get to this point because of the obstruction,” he said. “I’ve had to serve subpoena after subpoena to get information.”

A 2023 State Department review assigned blame both to Trump’s team and the Biden administration for the withdrawal. “There was insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios and how quickly those might follow,” the review found.

McCaul’s report faulted the Trump administration for its handling of US-Taliban negotiations that led to the 2020 withdrawal deal, though it directed most of the blame at Trump’s envoy to the talks, former ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, rather than the president.

It cites one witness as saying Khalilzad was “too willing to make concessions to the Taliban and to throw the Afghan government under the bus.”

It goes on to fault Biden for ignoring that the Taliban wasn’t living up to its agreements after he took office. Biden “failed to heed the warnings of his military advisers or listen to advice from across his administration,” the report alleged.

--With assistance from Iain Marlow.

(Updates with State Department statement in seventh paragraph)

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