GOP probe of Biden’s Afghanistan exit expands as election nears

House Republicans are expanding their investigation of the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, according to people familiar with that matter, pursuing additional witness testimony as former president Donald Trump attempts to make the war’s deadly endgame a central issue with the election now weeks away.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee’s GOP majority has been in contact with at least three senior military officers who were in Kabul in August 2021 and directly involved in the hastily organized evacuation of tens of thousands of people whose safety was in jeopardy when the Afghan government collapsed. The operation left U.S. forces partially reliant for their security on Taliban militants, whose regime U.S. and coalition forces had warred with for 20 years, as they made a stunning return to power.

The senior officers targeted by the committee are Army Lt. Gen. Christopher Donahue, Navy Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, who recently retired from active duty, and Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Farrell Sullivan, according to several people familiar with the matter. Each officer supervised U.S. forces during the evacuation, and Vasely and Sullivan previously voiced frustration with the Biden administration’s management of the crisis.

The Foreign Affairs Committee, which had been forecast to complete its investigation by now, also has intensified efforts to speak with at least two key administration figures: Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was subpoenaed by the committee this week, and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

A Pentagon spokesman, James Adams, acknowledged that Donahue, Vasely and Sullivan had provided lawmakers with their “personal views and perspectives” and said “we are not aware of any official congressional requests for additional testimony” from them or other military personnel. A committee aide, who like others interviewed for this report spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing and politically charged inquiry, said investigators are reviewing the officers’ responses and that it is possible they will be asked for further participation in the inquiry.

A spokesman for Blinken, Matthew Miller, has accused the committee’s GOP leadership of “acting in bad faith.” A White House spokeswoman, Sharon Yang, said in a statement that the administration has taken “extraordinary measures to be cooperative” with the investigation, including making senior officials available for hearings and transcribed interviews, providing briefings to lawmakers and their staffs, and producing tens of thousands of pages of documents.

House Republicans’ plan to expand and prolong their investigation emerges as Trump prepares to debate Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent, on Tuesday night. Coinciding with that, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), the committee chair, is expected to release a report by Monday condemning the Biden-Harris team’s handling of the withdrawal. Committee Democrats are expected to respond with a report of their own defending the current administration. The additional testimony from three commanders is not expected to be included in either report but could be publicized at another time, people familiar with matter said.

It was not immediately clear whether either document will shed much new light on the episode, which is among the lowest moments of Joe Biden’s presidency and already has been thoroughly scrutinized by Congress and other institutions. The Afghanistan War Commission, a congressionally mandated bipartisan examination of the entire 20-year conflict commenced in July, is expected to make its findings public by August 2026.

In recent weeks, Trump’s campaign along with his allies in Congress have seized on the Afghanistan withdrawal to levy attacks on Harris, pointing to a suicide bombing during the operation’s waning days that killed 13 U.S. service members along with an estimated 170 Afghans. A number of the victims’ families have embraced the former president, fiercely defending him amid accusations from Democrats and other critics who say he is exploiting their tragedy for political gain. In the past, Trump has drawn the ire of military survivors and former aides disgusted by his alleged denunciation of fallen troops, whom is said to have called “suckers” and “losers.”

Democrats on the Foreign Affairs Committee have consistently dismissed the investigation as partisan, noting that it fails to explore how Trump’s negotiations and withdrawal deal with the Taliban, signed in February 2020 during his presidency, helped set the conditions for Afghanistan’s collapse under Biden.

One Democrat on the committee, asked about the Republicans seeking testimony from the generals, suggested the GOP wants to “continue the theatrics” after compiling a “partisan report.”

“If it looks, walks and quacks like desperate politics …” the Democrat said, leaving the sentence unfinished.

Another Democratic staff member said that while those members are partisan players, too, they have emphasized the importance of representing witness testimony in context.

“That’s because we want witnesses to keep coming and talking voluntarily to the committee,” the staff member said. “It is important to us that our committee’s oversight function be taken seriously and not become some laughingstock.”

Leslie Shedd, a spokeswoman for the committee’s Republican majority, rejected those assertions. McCaul, the chairman, began investigating the Afghanistan evacuation immediately after it happened, at a time the GOP was in the House minority, and repeatedly urged Democrats to join him, she said. “They chose to ignore his pleas and ignore this deadly catastrophe,” Shedd said.

An independent assessment by the congressionally appointed Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found in 2022 that “the most important factor” in the collapse of the Afghan military was Trump’s withdrawal deal, “followed by President Biden’s withdrawal announcement,” which he made a few months after taking office in 2021.

McCaul claimed in a statement that his investigation will expose how the Biden administration “misled, and in some instances outright lied,” to the American people, prioritizing “optics over the safety and security of U.S. personnel.” And while an earlier report by McCaul’s committee barely mentioned Harris, he stressed now that she “was there every step of the way.”

“It is up to the American people to determine if they believe these things should disqualify Vice President Harris from continuing the Biden-Harris administration another four years,” McCaul said.

Democrats have countered that while the 13 Americans’ deaths were tragic, they must be put into the proper context of ending a 20-year war responsible for deaths of more than 2,400 other U.S. troops and tens of thousands of Afghan civilians. In signing the withdrawal deal with the Taliban that called for all U.S. personnel to leave Afghanistan by spring 2021, Trump left Biden with few good options, they argue.

Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), an Afghanistan War veteran and member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said that McCaul and his team have not taken an “appropriate approach” to the review.

“Ultimately,” he said in an interview, Republicans “decided to take a partisan approach to this, and weaponize the investigation, and make it just about a one-month period of an over-20-year war.”

The topic has grown increasingly politicized as Trump and other Republicans zero in on Harris’s comment in April 2021 that she was the “last person in the room” with Biden before he made up his mind about whether to withdraw. Afghan security forces disintegrated over the next few months as the Taliban swept across the country and into the capital.

While U.S. officials familiar with Biden’s deliberations have said there’s no indication Harris had sway with him on an issue in which he was deeply entrenched, Trump has claimed that Biden and Harris together were to blame for the deaths of the 13 service members “just like they pulled the trigger.”

One former senior U.S. official who has been involved in the investigation assessed that McCaul is now “in a tough spot,” attempting to navigate his desire to hold the Biden administration accountable without losing control of the situation.

“He has got to look around and weigh the odds of Trump winning this election — and of course the Republicans think this is something that will help Trump win,” the official said.

The committee’s latest moves follow the resignation in August of Jerry Dunleavy, a conservative journalist retained by the GOP to work on the investigation who had grown frustrated by what he called a failure by the majority to aggressively scrutinize the U.S. government’s final year in Afghanistan. The families of many of the service members killed in the bombing at the Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate also have pressed for greater accountability — reserving particular fury for Blinken, Sullivan and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, whom they view as the architects of a disorganized departure that assumed far too much risk.

Jim McCollum, the father of one of the Marines killed in the attack, said in an interview that he is appreciative of the committee’s work and hopes to see it pursue additional witnesses.

“It looks to me like NSC has a central role in what happened,” he said, referring to the White House’s National Security Council.

Dunleavy, in a pointed letter posted online, wrote that he quit in protest of how McCaul and his staff had handled the investigation. Senior staff members, he alleged, had stymied some of his efforts.

Dunleavy, who has never been to Afghanistan but grew interested in the war when his brother deployed, co-authored a book about the evacuation and came to the GOP’s investigation with strong convictions about Biden’s failings. After his resignation, which he described as coming after McCaul disregarded a series of his suggestions and analyses, Dunleavy also cast the committee’s work as a failure.

Asked in an interview whether the committee also has a responsibility to scrutinize Trump’s Afghanistan decisions, Dunleavy acknowledged that the former president’s deal with the Taliban was a “very flawed agreement.” But the “proximate cause” of the Taliban seizing control of the country, he argued, was Biden ordering the full withdrawal of U.S. troops.

The committee declined to answer questions about Dunleavy’s accusations.