Exclusive: State Department officials told House investigators they created Afghanistan withdrawal plans from scratch

CNN ^ | Thu April 4, 2024 | Kylie Atwood and Jennifer Hansler

[MinorityRepublican]

Hours of closed-door testimony from three top State Department officials shed new light on the “unprecedented” situation in the final days of the US presence in Afghanistan as the officials were rushed to the country with virtually no time to prepare and no established emergency evacuation plan in place when they arrived.

The three officials, John Bass, Jim DeHart and Jayne Howell, were all plucked from unrelated assignments and rushed into Afghanistan in the hours after Kabul fell to the Taliban due to their extensive experience in Afghanistan.

The transcripts of their interviews with the House Foreign Affairs Committee, obtained exclusively by CNN, are the latest tranche of more than a dozen interviews conducted by the committee as a key part of Republican Chairman Michael McCaul’s ongoing investigation into the 2021 evacuation that involved the deaths of 13 US service members.

McCaul is planning to put out a report later this year that includes overall takeaways from the interviews, as well as State Department notes the House Foreign Affairs Committee has received from the agency’s own review of the withdrawal.

Biden administration officials expect that the report will be timed with a political motive: to bring the Afghanistan withdrawal back to the fore during the heat of the presidential election.

[MinorityRepublican]

Nah.