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House panel weighs holding Blinken in contempt over Afghanistan withdrawal testimony
Washington — The Republican-led House Foreign Affairs Committee is expected to recommend Tuesday that Secretary of State Antony Blinken be held in contempt of Congress amid a standoff over the top diplomat’s testimony about the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The committee’s chairman, Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, subpoenaed Blinken earlier this month for his testimony, threatening to hold him in contempt if he did not appear before the panel on Sept. 19. In the letter subpoenaing Blinken, McCaul said Blinken’s appearance was important as the committee considers “potential legislation aimed at helping prevent the catastrophic mistakes of the withdrawal.”
The State Department said it had proposed other dates for Blinken’s testimony, citing his travel overseas as the U.S. tries to secure a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas. It also offered to have Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell appear before the committee if the panel was set on last week’s date.
“We continue to not understand why the committee has chosen to take this step,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Sept. 17, calling the markup an “extraordinarily unnecessary and unproductive step.”
Miller noted that Blinken had answered questions about Afghanistan in his 14 appearances before Congress, including the four times he has testified to McCaul’s committee.
Committee spokesperson Emily Cassil fired back in a statement that accused the State Department of consistently engaging “in obfuscation and outright avoidance.”
McCaul delayed the panel’s meeting by five days and issued another subpoena for Blinken to appear then.
“If Secretary Blinken fails to appear, the chairman will proceed instead with a full committee markup of a report recommending the U.S. House of Representatives find Secretary Blinken in contempt of Congress for violating a duly issued subpoena,” a notice said.
Though Blinken is in the U.S., he is attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York City and meeting with world leaders, Miller said last week.
“Once again, they have unilaterally selected a date,” Miller said, adding that the committee was told in advance of Blinken’s schedule. “It very much does not appear that they’re acting in good faith.”
Beginning next week, Congress is scheduled to be in recess through October, providing limited days for Blinken to testify unless committee members return to Washington during the break.
Even if the measure advances out of the committee, the full House would still need to vote to refer it to the Justice Department for prosecution, and it’s highly unlikely that Blinken would be prosecuted by the Biden administration.
The committee’s Republican majority released a report earlier this month that detailed the panel’s yearslong investigation into the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and accused the Biden administration of misleading the public about the pullout.
The lengthy report is highly critical of President Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, accusing the president and his administration of ignoring repeated warnings from military officials, national security advisers and U.S. allies about the risks associated with drawing American forces down to zero because he “prioritized politics and his personal legacy over America’s national security interests.”
Thirteen U.S. service members died in a suicide bombing in Kabul during the evacuation.
“This was one of the deadliest days in Afghanistan. It could have been prevented if the State Department did its job by law and executed the plan of evacuation,” McCaul said in a Sept. 8 interview on “Face the Nation.”
During its investigation, the committee conducted 18 transcribed interviews with Biden administration officials and received more than 20,000 pages of documents from the State Department, some of which were obtained through subpoenas. Blinken was not among those who testified.
Democratic members of the Foreign Affairs Committee put out their own report that defended the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal amid swiftly changing conditions. Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, the committee’s top Democrat, argued that the Republican majority took “particular pains to avoid facts involving former President Donald Trump.”
The Trump administration struck a deal with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. forces from the country by May 2021. The deal, known as the Doha Agreement, laid out a series of conditions to be fulfilled by the Taliban before U.S. forces would withdraw from Afghanistan.
Last year, the State Department released a partially declassified report that faulted both the Trump and Biden administrations for “insufficient” planning surrounding the withdrawal.
HUNTSVILLE — A Texas man who had waived his right to appeal his death sentence was put to death Tuesday evening for killing his 3-month-old son more than 16 years ago, one of five executions scheduled within a week’s time in the U.S.
AP
Travis Mullis, 38, received a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville and was pronounced dead at 7:01 p.m. CDT. He was condemned for stomping to death his son Alijah in January 2008.
Mullis was the fourth inmate put to death this year in Texas, the nation’s busiest capital punishment state. Another execution was carried out Tuesday evening in Missouri, and on Thursday, executions were scheduled to take place in Oklahoma and Alabama. South Carolina conducted an execution Friday.
Authorities said Mullis, then 21 and living in Brazoria County, drove to nearby Galveston with his son after fighting with his girlfriend. Mullis parked his car and sexually assaulted his son. After the infant began to cry uncontrollably, Mullis began strangling the child before taking him out of the car and stomping on his head, according to authorities.
The infant’s body was later found on the roadside. Mullis fled the state but was later arrested after surrendering to police in Philadelphia.
Mullis’ execution proceeded after one of his attorneys, Shawn Nolan, said he planned no late appeals in a bid to spare the inmate’s life. Nolan also said in a statement Tuesday afternoon that Texas would be executing a “redeemed man” who has always accepted responsibility for committing “an awful crime.”
“He never had a chance at life being abandoned by his parents and then severely abused by his adoptive father starting at age three. During his decade and a half on death row, he spent countless hours working on his redemption. And he achieved it. The Travis that Texas wanted to kill is long gone. Rest in Peace TJ,” Nolan said.
Mullis declined an offer earlier in the day to phone his attorney from a holding cell outside the death chamber, said Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokeswoman Hannah Haney. His lawyers also did not file a clemency petition with the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.
In a letter submitted in February to U.S. District Judge George Hanks in Houston, Mullis wrote that he had no desire to challenge his case any further. Mullis has previously taken responsibility for his son’s death and has said “his punishment fit the crime.”
At Mullis’ trial, prosecutors said Mullis was a “monster” who manipulated people, was deceitful and refused the medical and psychiatric help he had been offered.
Since his conviction in 2011, Mullis has long been at odds with his various attorneys over whether to appeal his case. At times, Mullis had asked that his appeals be waived, only to later change his mind.
Nolan had previously told the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals during a June 2023 hearing that state courts in Texas had erred in ruling that Mullis had been mentally competent when he had waived his right to appeal his case about a decade earlier.
Nolan told the appeals court that Mullis has been treated for “profound mental illness” since he was 3 years old, was sexually abused as a child and is “severely bipolar,” leading him to change his mind about appealing.
Natalie Thompson, who at the time was with the Texas Attorney General’s Office, told the appeals court that Mullis understood what he was doing and could go against his lawyers’ advice “even if he’s suffering from mental illness.”
The appeals court upheld Hank’s ruling from 2021 that found Mullis “repeatedly competently chose to waive review” of his death sentence.
The U.S. Supreme Court has prohibited the application of the death penalty for the intellectually disabled, but not for people with serious mental illness.
If the remaining executions in Texas, Alabama and Oklahoma are carried out as planned, it will mark the first time in more than 20 years — since July 2003 — that five were held in seven days, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, which takes no position on capital punishment but has criticized the way states carry out executions.
The first took place Friday when South Carolina put inmate Freddie Owens to death. Also Tuesday, Marcellus Williams was executed in Missouri. On Thursday, executions are scheduled for Alan Miller in Alabama and Emmanuel Littlejohn in Oklahoma.
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