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His. Tom’s Cotton, R-Ark., Calls on State Secretary Antony Blinken to explain why he was not present at a meeting regarding planning for the withdrawal from Afghanistan in May.
“The Biden administration staged a rehearsal of the withdrawal from Afghanistan in May, but Tony Blinken did not attend,” the senator tweeted Thursday with a press release. “Where was @SecBlinken during this exercise? “
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Cotton said in a statement he sent a letter to Blinken demanding answers on his whereabouts during the meeting.
“It has come to my attention that on May 8, 2021, the Biden administration organized an exercise for principals to repeat the plan to withdraw from Afghanistan,” Cotton wrote. withdrawal, along with White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, CIA Director William Burns, US Agency for International Development Administrator Samantha Power and United Nations Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield.
“Obviously, you wouldn’t have seen the exercise,” he continued. “You didn’t send your first assistant, Wendy Sherman, either. Instead, you sent the third-rank official to the State Department.
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The letter ends with the question “Where were you on May 8, 2021?” “
The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News.
The Biden administration has been widely criticized from both sides of the aisle for its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, which has claimed the lives of 13 U.S. servicemen killed in a terrorist bombing outside the United States. Kabul airport.
Mountain peak Pentagon officials blamed the State Department this week for not having started the evacuations of civilians from Afghanistan earlier, calling the efforts “chaotic” while defending the “skills and leadership” of US troops in a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday.
The US military withdrawal from Afghanistan was completed on August 31, after successfully evacuating more than 124,000 people from Kabul, including 6,000 US citizens. Despite the large number of evacuations before the withdrawal date, at least 100 US citizens and thousands of Afghan allies remain in Afghanistan.
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Pressed to find out why the evacuations didn’t start sooner, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said it was a “State Department call.”
“We are making a contribution, as I said in my opening statement, to the State Department,” Austin said, however explaining that officials were “warned” by the Ghani administration that “if they withdraw American citizens and SIV candidates at too fast a rate, it would cause a government collapse that we were trying to prevent. “
Fox News’ Brooke Singman and Rich Edson contributed to this report
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