Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki is officially locked in to testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee about the botched 2021 US pullout from Afghanistan.
Last month, committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) announced Psaki had tentatively agreed to appear July 26, pending White House approval.
The Biden administration has since given the green light, and the Psaki sitdown is “fully set,” a committee spokesperson told The Post Tuesday, confirming an Axios report.
“The Committee has a vested interest in understanding those diplomatic and information transmission failures, which led to misrepresentations regarding, amongst other things, coordination with allies, contingency planning, the foreseeability of Afghanistan’s collapse, and the safety of Americans and allies in Afghanistan,” McCaul said last month.
Ultimately, the White House counsel’s office told the panel it would allow Psaki to be interviewed as an “extraordinary accommodation.”
McCaul had threatened Psaki with a subpoena if she failed to show up.
The committee initially sought an interview with Psaki in September, but the White House stymied that at the time, telling the panel to exhaust other avenues of finding the information it was after.
Psaki left the White House in May 2022 and is currently a host and analyst on MSNBC.
In May of this year, the ex-Biden spokeswoman was forced to correct a false claim in her book, “Say More,” that Biden did not check his watch during the dignified transfer ceremony for 13 murdered American service members at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
The Americans had been killed in an Aug. 26, 2021, ISIS-K suicide bombing while trying to process Afghan evacuees at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee has been working on a report chronicling the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s return to power, and is expected to release it at some point before the presidential election.
McCaul has repeatedly clashed with the Biden administration throughout the course of the investigation, including over acquiring dissent cables from US diplomats who criticized the pullout.
Another key facet of the report is expected to be details about discrepancies between what President Biden was telling the public and the reality on the ground.
Psaki could shed light on what the administration’s communications team knew about the situation in Afghanistan and what it did and did not tell Americans.
The Afghanistan catastrophe marked a key turning point in Biden’s political standing with the public.
Prior to the withdrawal, Biden enjoyed positive job approval ratings. Afterward, those ratings turned negative and have remained there ever since, per the RealClearPolitics average.
Psaki’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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