As a result of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s refusal to abide by a number of subpoenas, Texas Republican Rep. Michael McCaul intends to prosecute him with contempt of Congress this month.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee’s chairman, McCaul, has repeatedly tried to get Blinken to appear before the panel. The leading Republican now claims that he will file the contempt case on May 24. By early June, it will probably be put to a full vote on the House floor.
“I don’t take this lightly because a secretary of State’s never been held in contempt by Congress before,” McCaul told Fox News Monday evening. “And I think the secretary realizes that and the gravity. They probably prefer not to go down this route as well. But if they do not comply, we’re prepared to move forward next week with markup for resolution of contempt.”
“Even if passed by the House, the contempt charge would largely be a symbolic move, as President Biden’s Justice Department would likely decline to prosecute the case. McCaul first floated the possibility of a criminal contempt charge last week. Blinken and the State Department have blown past multiple deadlines to provide documents relating to President Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in recent months,” Fox News reported.
“The Department is now in violation of its legal obligation to produce these documents and must do so immediately,” McCaul wrote last week. “Should the Department fail to comply with its legal obligation, the Committee is prepared to take the necessary steps to enforce its subpoena, including holding you in contempt of Congress and/or initiating a civil enforcement proceeding.”
“McCaul and his fellow Republicans seek access to materials, including a dissent report from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul dated just before Biden’s withdrawal plans were set in motion. Dissent reports detail any misgivings U.S. officials may have with a current plan of action. Blinken blew past the original deadline to supply the documents in March, then again in April when McCaul pushed back the deadline. McCaul set his latest line in the sand on May 1, and Blinken again refused to provide the documents,” the report added.
This week, there has been a lot of criticism directed towards the Biden administration.
After Special Counsel John Durham revealed the results of the lengthy investigation into former President Donald Trump and suspected Russian collusion, the FBI was obliged to make a significant admission.
Durham discovered that the FBI began looking into Trump before the 2016 election using “uncorroborated intelligence” and that agents consistently failed to uphold “strict fidelity to the law” throughout the investigation.
The FBI replied shortly after the report became public by admitting that some mistakes were committed in 2016. The FBI also acknowledged the veracity of Durham’s findings.
The Daily Caller highlighted some significant revelations in the report regarding Hillary Clinton:
The report noted that the FBI received intelligence that Hillary Clinton’s campaign approved “a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services,” specifically one that involved “tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee” to distract the public from her email scandals. It notes that President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and FBI Director James Comey were personally briefed on Clinton’s scheme, known as the “Clinton Plan” in the report, by CIA Director John Brennan, who recorded mentioning the plan in his handwritten notes.
The “Clinton Plan” was obtained by the FBI while it was relying on the “Steele Dossier,” a discredited report of lurid allegations of Trump’s personal sexual activity, which the FBI knew was being funded and promoted by the Clinton campaign, according to the report. Durham quotes information from a meeting between the Dossier’s author, former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, and FBI agents, as well as texts between FBI officials, to demonstrate that the agents knew the evidence was connected to Clinton.
According to Durham’s investigation, the FBI and US Department of Justice wasted little time in looking into Trump, and their behavior was a “notable departure” from how they rejected attempts to look into allegations about the Clinton campaign.
The FBI informed Clinton campaign staffers of potential threats against them but disregarded information from “a trusted foreign source” that suggested Clinton was plotting to demonize Trump by linking him to Vladimir Putin in order to draw attention away from her own concerns about using a private email server.
