Rep. Brian Mast said Tuesday on Newsmax that President Joe Biden ignored a key dissent cable in 2021 warning of the Afghan government's inability to ward off Taliban forces.
Joining "The Record with Greta Van Susteren," the Florida Republican suggested that Biden could have avoided the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle if he had taken the Agency for International Development's Dissent Channel seriously.
The Dissent Channel is a messaging framework for Foreign Service Officers and other U.S. citizens to express constructive criticism of government policy, according to its government website.
"You would only want to know the facts if you were executing national security objectives, which we know for a fact the Biden administration was not executing," Mast explained.
"The fact that they chose Sept. 11 as the original withdrawal date just points to the fact about how this was all about politics, all about presenting a message to the media, not about national security objectives," he added.
It comes as the Department of State and USAID have consistently rejected a House Committee on Foreign Affairs public request for the cable, which reportedly features some officials warning of the imminent collapse of Kabul.
The panel's chair, Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, and its ranking member, Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., had privately viewed the cable last week.
"I'm not going to speak for every individual Democrat on the committee, ... but I can tell you they absolutely want to see it," Mast said of the cable. "And behind close doors, they have been quite strong against this as well in saying, 'We need to see this.'"
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