Dear Chairman McCaul,
I wish to deliver a proper description for my departure from my place as a senior analyst for the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s research into the Biden-Harris Administration’s disastrous departure from Afghanistan in 2021. Now is the day I resign. I am grateful for being asked to serve in this position for the past month.
I believe the Committee’s function has been significant and the research has consistently uncovered evidence further solidifying the undeniable fact that the harmful decision by President Biden — one strongly supported by Vice President Harris — to fully and quickly take out all U. S. troops from Afghanistan with no plan for how to deal with the obvious fallout was a dangerous disaster. The investigation more demonstrates that the Biden-Harris Administration’s series of poor choices in 2021 caused the Afghan government to fall, the Taliban to conquer the nation, the incidents of 13 U.S. service members at Abbey Gate, the abandonment of thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Afghan supporters, and a rise in violence. In addition, the research has also established that the failure of the Biden-Harris Administration has created a more dangerous world.
Even as I applaud the Committee’s successes, many of which have come because of your ongoing leadership on this issue, I must also understand and highlight the investigation’s faults, especially the missed opportunities resulting from the Committee’s unwillingness or inability to pursue important testimony and from its failure to go down key analytical avenues. I think this has greatly impacted the Committee’s mission statement. And I believe that the quest for truth desired by the American people, and more tragically by the Gold Star families, has been hurt by this investigative paralysis.
When I was asked to join the Committee as a senior investigator after reporting on and writing a book on the debacle in Afghanistan, I made it clear that I believed the Committee’s investigation should be sweeping in scope and should pursue every lead possible. You, Mr. Chairman, and senior staff informed me that everyone was in agreement on this. My view, then and now, was that the Biden-Harris withdrawal from Afghanistan was a diplomatic failure, an intelligence failure, a military failure, a strategic failure, a policy failure, a planning failure, a political failure, a truth-telling failure, and a moral failure — but above all a leadership failure by President Biden. And I think that should be looked into in all ways for that failure.
Yet my efforts to fully pursue investigative leads have been repeatedly stymied by our chief investigator and by senior staff, and, unfortunately, sometimes by indecision from you, Mr. Chairman. What I am about to lay out should not be considered comprehensive — it is merely meant to highlight a number of ways in which I believe the Committee has allowed members of the Biden-Harris Administration to avoid deserved scrutiny. I’m writing this to help the Committee see the flaws in its investigation so it can profit from the 118th Congress’s last few months, not to criticize the Committee, but to help it see the flaws in its investigation.
While the Committee has interviewed an impressive number of State Department witnesses and has extracted devastating testimony from them, there has been a repeated refusal to ask to interview a number of key high-ranking witnesses from that Department, despite my urging. Ambassador Tracey Jacobson, the then-current nominee for ambassador to Iraq, Wendy Sherman, the now-ex-former Deputy Secretary of State, and Victoria Nuland, the now-ex-former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, are among those who have been given the opportunity to escape such scrutiny. There are also a number of key State Department documents that our Committee has refused to request despite my repeated urging. All of these interviews and documents should still be requested.
Both my numerous and ongoing requests for testimony from USAID Administrator Samantha Power and former Senior Deputy Homeland Security Advisor for the NSC, who was a signer of the Hunter Biden laptop letter and played a significant role in the Biden-Harris Administration’s failed handling of the SIV process, have been turned down. The Committee should still seek to bring these witnesses in.
Rear Admiral Vasely, Major General Chris Donahue, Brigadier General Farrell Sullivan, TRANSCOM Commander General Stephen Lyons, and Army Major General Curtis Buzzard have all been transcribed interviews, but this has also not been done. I have also requested that we pursue testimony from other key U. S. military figures and U. S. service members who could also shed further light on the NEO, on U. S. interactions with the Taliban, and on the Abbey Gate bombing, but this has similarly never happened. I have compiled dozens of questions that military commanders should be asked. Additionally, I have provided a number of documents that we should request from the Pentagon, requests that have been rejected or ignored by senior staff. All of these witnesses and documents should still be requested.
The Committee has failed to properly investigate the ISIS-K suicide bombing and the United States ‘ dependence on the Taliban to provide security at HKIA during the NEO despite your public vows as chairman to the Abbey Gate Gold Star families and our private promises to the families. I believe that CENTCOM’s initial investigation and supplemental review of the Abbey Gate bombing, while revealing some key facts and riveting testimony, also contained conclusions which were not fully supported by the facts or were otherwise designed to deflect blame or whitewash what had happened.
CENTCOM provided the Committee with a Member-level briefing on its supplemental Abbey Gate review in a classified space — meaning little, if any, of the info gleaned can be made public. I’ve repeatedly argued that the CENTCOM investigators should give an unclassified and transcribed briefing on the bombing at Abbey Gate, and that our chief investigator and senior staff were never interested in pursuing this request. For many months, I have pressed our chief investigator to send CENTCOM and the Department of Defense a list of dozens of detailed questions on the NEO, the Abbey Gate bombing, the U. S. military’s reliance upon the Taliban to provide security at HKIA, intelligence on ISIS-K, and much more — but my requests have been rejected.
I’ve come to know and respect many of the Gold Star families and a number of the American troops who bravely and heroically served on the ground during the NEO while writing my book and serving on this Committee. As Chairman, you made promises to the Gold Star families about relentlessly pursuing answers for them, and as Committee staff we made private promises to the families echoing the same. The Committee’s investigation simply has not lived up to those promises. However, as I have repeatedly suggested, it is still possible to ask questions and bring in witnesses.
The House Armed Services Committee has failed to investigate these matters itself, and has often been slow and reluctant to assist our own Committee, but that is no excuse for inaction on our part.
Additionally, I think the Committee’s decision to speak with Lieutenant Colonel Brad Whited, a crucial military officer, in a classified setting without any transcription of the conversation, sparked immediate discord and disagreement over some of the things the military officer had even said. Without a record of the exchange, the contents of his testimony may never be fully known, and the classified setting also limits what can be shared publicly.
I have also advocated for months that our Committee team up with other Committees on joint letters related to the debacle in Afghanistan. I suggested a joint letter with House Oversight asking for U.S. intelligence products from 2021, which examined the viability of the Afghan government, the likelihood of a Taliban takeover, and a number of other topics, as well as a joint letter with House Judiciary on the FBI’s purported investigation into the Abbey Gate bombing and bomber, as well as a joint letter with House Intel. All of my proposals here were ignored or rejected by our chief investigator. The Committee should continue to pursue these, though.
I believe the Committee has also erred in its approach to some of the State Department witnesses that we did bring in — including repeatedly not including key questions that I proposed for these witnesses ( while almost always failing to provide any explanation for why these questions were cut ) and failing to properly follow-up on holding these witnesses accountable.
After conducting a transcribed interview with Ambassador Ross Wilson, the final U. S. ambassador to Afghanistan, I strongly believed that Wilson should be brought in for a full public hearing, given the multitude of failures he was responsible for after being retained in his position by President Biden. Initial consensus within the Committee was to bring him in for a hearing, but senior staff quickly resisted. Eventually, I was told by our chief investigator that bringing in Ross Wilson would make us look like bullies. I have to agree that Ambassador Wilson had more than earned his time in front of Congress, and a public accounting is not bullying. The Committee can and should still bring him in for a hearing.
After conducting a transcribed interview with Zalmay Khalilzad, the former Special Representative for Afghan Reconciliation, it became clearer than ever to me how dishonest Khalilzad continued to be about the nature of the Taliban and about his actions as a negotiator in Doha. However, our chief investigator informed congressional staff that Khalilzad had been the most reliable of the witnesses we had interviewed up until the follow-on public hearing, which I found to be both alarming and untrue. Unfortunately, this gave the strong ( and wrong ) impression to congressional staff that Khalilzad was a friendly witness, a misleading view likely passed along to their Members. In Khalilzad, this is not the case. All evidence indicates that Zal is in it for Zal. For the title of the Khalilzad hearing, I suggested ideas such as” Trusting the Taliban” or” The Disaster in Doha” with the goal of highlighting Khalilzad’s role in the debacle. Instead, the Committee chose” Behind the Scenes: How the Biden Administration Failed to Implement the Doha Agreement.” As I explained at the time, this hearing name would set the wrong tone for questioning, falsely suggesting that Khalilzad bore little responsibility for the catastrophe. Instead of using the opportunity to rightly criticize the Biden-Harris Administration’s bizarre choice to keep the architect of that bad deal in charge of even more high-stakes diplomacy with the Taliban, a choice that led to the Taliban taking control of Afghanistan, it also alarmingly cast the deeply flawed Doha Agreement in a positive light. It is true the Biden-Harris Administration utterly failed to enforce even the meager provisions of the Doha deal, even as the Taliban violated each provision, but the hearing with Khalilzad should have been much broader in scope.
The Committee’s framing, in my view, treated Khalilzad gently, when instead the goal should have been to highlight Khalilzad’s mendacity and to hammer the Biden-Harris Administration for keeping him in his diplomatic perch despite his obvious failings in dealing with the Taliban. I think this led to a much less effective hearing than it should have.
Additionally, an anecdote from moments after the hearing illustrates what I see as the flawed direction of the Committee’s investigation. Our chief investigator approached Khalilzad on the floor of the hearing room shortly after he had finished speaking and requested that he take a smiling selfie with him in front of the audience, including Gold Star families and veterans of the war in Afghanistan. Given what I and a multitude of others believe to be Khalilzad’s significant role in the end of the Afghan republic, I found such a move to be highly inappropriate and potentially harmful to the optics surrounding our investigation.
After the hearing, I repeatedly urged our chief investigator to send Khalilzad a specific QFR related to a false claim he had made that the Taliban had cooperated with the United States fully during the evacuation — a claim contradicted by a host of evidence, including General McKenzie himself publicly admitting that the U. S. military repeatedly asked the Taliban to search or raid ISIS-K locations during the NEO, with the Taliban sometimes refusing to do so. This QFR, in my opinion, was never sent. Despite months passing, the Committee should still send Khalilzad the QFR that I suggested. And I only want to urge the Committee to make sure that Khalilzad’s final report accurately portrays the devastating failures of 2020 and 2021.
As I expressed repeatedly throughout the process, I also have serious problems with the way that the eventual public hearing with General Milley and General McKenzie was handled. From the start, I made it clear that these men held a large amount of knowledge and information that only they were privy to. I argued that having them both for individual transcribed interviews and holding separate public hearings with them. Instead, after pushback from the generals, you as Chairman made an initial agreement that would have allowed the men to appear together and only in a classified space — meaning that, if that plan had been realized, little to none of what they would tell the Committee could ever have been made public. You wisely accepted criticism from the Gold Star families ( and from me ), and the Committee ended up holding a joint public hearing with the two men. But the lack of individual transcribed interviews or even individual public hearings meant that what we were able to get out of the hearing was limited by time constraints.
Other self-inflicted problems with the Milley-McKenzie hearing soon arose, especially with further special accommodations we made for the generals. A ‘ Strategic Failure: Biden’s Withdrawal, America’s Generals, and the Taliban Takeover was the initial title for the hearing that I had suggested and that you as Chairman had approved of. But, in a stunning accommodation for witnesses and an adjustment that is without precedent as far as I know, the Committee agreed to change the hearing title after General Milley reached out to complain that the title would cast some blame on him for the debacle. The top military brass is not held accountable for what ultimately transpired despite the fact that American military commanders undoubtedly provided more accurate predictions of the risks of a full withdrawal in 2021 than those presented by incompetent State Department officials or the NSC. But following General Milley’s complaints, the Committee agreed to modify a hearing title which had already been announced, changing it to” An Assessment of the Biden Administration’s Withdrawal from Afghanistan by America’s Generals” — wording that clearly signaled the generals bore little to no responsibility for the disaster that unfolded.
Additionally, the Committee allowed the generals to break the Committee’s typical practice of having witnesses submit written testimony prior to the hearing. General Milley did not actually start giving his written testimony until many days after the hearing, and as far as I know, General McKenzie never did ( despite releasing a book with numerous chapters on Afghanistan months later ) ).
One further anecdote from the Milley-McKenzie saga is illustrative of the way this investigation has unfortunately been run. Prior to the public hearing, General Milley made an offer to speak with Gold Star family members in person in a side room, and General McKenzie indicated that he would also be willing to do so. The Committee initially agreed we would have at least one staff member in the room during this conversation between the generals and the families, something the generals were fine with and the families desired. The families then articulated they wanted me specifically in the room with them during their talk with the generals. My superiors abruptly decided that we would not allow any of our employees into the room, denying the Committee a chance to support the Gold Star families and observe Milley and McKenzie’s discussion.
For the hearing, I proposed a host of questions to be presented to Members as suggestions to pose to General Milley and General McKenzie, but many of them were cut by our chief investigator. I suggested sending a lengthy series of QFRs to General Milley and General McKenzie immediately following the hearing so that we could conduct our due diligence and still try to get as many responses as possible regarding the withdrawal and the NEO. Despite my repeated insistence that we send these QFRs to the generals, it never happened. Even though months have lapsed since the hearing, the Committee should still send General Milley and General McKenzie those QFRs. And I once more simply urge the Committee to hold the generals accountable for their own grave errors and to record their errors in the Committee’s final report.
Finally, I have argued repeatedly that Vice President Kamala Harris should be held accountable for her role in the debacle in Afghanistan, especially now that she is the Democratic nominee for President of the United States and could soon be making national security decisions and directing foreign policy for our entire nation. The Committee has so far, despite my plea, taken no steps, and I have received backlash from my superiors regarding this.
The record is clear that Vice President Harris says she was involved in President Biden’s disastrous decision-making in 2021, including bragging that she was the last person in the room when President Biden made his foolish Go-to-Zero decision. Despite this, my proposal to question White House press secretary Jen Psaki on the issue of Harris’s involvement was rejected when our chief investigator did not include my related proposed questions in our question outline when we brought Psaki in last month. Psaki was the first fact witness to be presented to our Committee since Harris assumed the role of Democratic nominee ( Note: I will also note that my proposed questions related to Psaki’s knowledge about President Biden’s lack of mental fitness for the job were also cut at the insistence of a senior communications staffer.
My other two straightforward suggestions, which have been repeatedly made to my Committee superiors, were:
- As the Chairman, you should put out a press release criticizing her for her role in the fiasco. I urged this immediately upon Biden’s announcement that he would not be running for reelection and have urged it repeatedly since then, but for reasons unknown this has n’t happened.
- You should lead a House resolution that condemns her for her role, as chairman.
- The Committee should send the Vice President a lengthy list of probing questions pressing her on her role in the decision-making process related to Afghanistan throughout 2021.
- The Committee should request transcripts of conversations with Harris ‘ top advisers at the time, including: Sabrina Singh, Harris ‘ deputy press secretary at the time, Philip Gordon, Harris ‘ deputy national security adviser at the time, Hartina” Tina” Flournoy, Harris’s deputy chief of staff at the time, Michael Fuchs, Harris ‘ deputy chief of staff at the time, Symone Sanders-Townsend, Harris’s senior advisor at the time, Ashley Etienne, Harris ‘
The Committee’s failure to quickly begin holding Vice President Harris accountable for the part she played is befuddling and is more troubling than just being plain bad politics — this is about accountability for the person who desires to be our next Commander-in-Chief even after she, along with President Biden, played a key role in America’s embarrassing retreat and defeat in a twenty-year war. If she is elected, she might be newly emboldened by the belief that her poor decisions and failed actions are without consequences. If this issue is not vigorously pursued right away, the disastrous withdrawal of Afghanistan is likely to be only a blip in the Harris-Walz Administration’s more careless foreign policy. Harris simply cannot be allowed to skate on this — and yet, so far, she is indeed skating.
I thank you and the Committee for the efforts made to expose the malfeasance of President Biden’s handling of the withdrawal and evacuation from Afghanistan, and I once again thank you for the opportunity to work on this investigation for the Committee. Nonetheless, I must also repeat my disappointment with the Committee’s failure to properly and fully hold the Biden-Harris Administration accountable for its failures in 2021 and for the fallout which followed.
I will continue to advocate for answers and accountability because I believe we owe it to the Abbey Gate families, to all Gold Star families, to all the U. S. service members who fought and died over the course of the two-decade war, and to the American public. In this era of renewed Great Power competition, I worry that America has n’t learned from its defeat in the two-decade war in Afghanistan. It was my hope that the Committee’s investigation would aid in the learning of these critical lessons — and that hope remains.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Sincerely,
Jerry Dunleavy
Senior Investigator – House Foreign Affairs Committee
9-Aug-2024
Jerry Dunleavy is a former Justice Department and investigative reporter for the Washington Examiner, the co-author of” Kabul: The Untold Story of Biden’s Fiasco and the American Warriors Who Fought to the End”, and a former senior investigator with the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s investigation into the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
