US House panel subpoenas Trump's Afghan envoy Zalmay Khalilzad

[TomSea]

US House panel subpoenas Trump's Afghan envoy Zalmay Khalilzad
Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Engel says panel wants answers on Afghan peace plan now that US-Taliban talks are dead.
by William Roberts

Washington, DC - The House Foreign Affairs Committee said on Thursday it issued a subpoena to the Trump administration's special Afghanistan envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, demanding he appear before the panel next week to explain the failure of the US-Taliban talks.

"For months, we haven't been able to get answers on the Afghanistan peace plan, and now the president is saying the plan is dead," Representative Eliot Engel, Democrat chairman of the committee, said in a statement. Engel said the State Department had ignored requests from the committee to arrange briefings with Khalilzad in February and April, as well as at other times during the year.

"We need to hear directly from the administration's point person on Afghanistan to understand how this process went off the rails," Engel said.

Read more at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/09/house-panel-subpoenas-trump-afghan-envoy-zalmay-khalilzad-190912194653940.html

[PeteS in CA]

Foreign affairs are delegated by the constitution to the President. Since the Dems are in subpoena-everybody mode, I suspect Trump will claim executive privilege, with good prospect of success. And at some point, Trump may be able to claim in court that the Dems have attempted so many abuses of their authority that the Dems' authority to subpoena anybody should be restricted or simply shut down.