The top Democrat and the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee are urging President Biden to investigate the poisoning of Russian political activist Alexei Navalny, to provide U.S. findings to Congress, and to hold the Kremlin accountable if it is found responsible, as other countries and investigators have concluded.
Democratic Chairman Gregory Meeks of New York and Rep. Michael McCaul, the Republican ranking member from Texas, sent a joint letter to Biden on Friday, noting that they were “deeply concerned” about the poisoning of Navalny on Aug. 20 with a Novichok chemical nerve agent and about the fact that the United States “has yet to hold those responsible accountable.”
The duo said that they “formally request the executive branch investigate, without delay, whether the Government of the Russian Federation has used chemical weapons in violation of international law or has used lethal chemical weapons against its own nationals” pursuant to the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991.
“The United States should not turn a blind eye to the Putin regime’s use of chemical weapons in contravention of international law and fundamental principles of human rights, nor the Kremlin’s growing willingness to use poison and bullets to silence its political opponents at home and even beyond its borders,” Meeks and McCaul said. “The Putin regime must be made to understand that such unacceptable behavior will always be met with significant costs from the United States and the rest of the free world.”
Navalny was immediately arrested in Russia when he returned to the country earlier in January after recovering in Europe from his poisoning.
A wave of protests broke out throughout Russia this weekend following the jailing of the Russian dissident, with the spokesperson for the U.S. ambassador in Moscow tweeting, “We’re watching reports of protests in 38 Russian cities, arrests of 350+ peaceful protesters and journalists … Steps being taken by Russian authorities are suppressing those rights.”
State Department spokesman Ned Price released a statement on Saturday afternoon that the U.S. was calling on Russia “to release all those detained for exercising their universal rights and for the immediate and unconditional release of Aleksey Navalny” and “to fully cooperate with the international community’s investigation” into his poisoning.
Meeks and McCaul alleged the Trump administration “failed to comply with” the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act and “ignored prior requests to report to Congress on the information the executive branch possesses on the poisoning.”
The law notes that whenever “persuasive information” becomes available indicating the “substantial possibility” that chemical or biological weapons have been used by a foreign country, the president has 60 days to determine if the other country’s government contravened international law. A Justice Department legal opinion from the year the law passed concluded that the president “may” delay making a determination “when the delay is necessary to protect intelligence sources or methods.”
The two congressmen told Biden that “we urge your Administration to conduct this investigation, submit your findings to Congress, and make a determination without delay” and “if your investigation confirms that the Putin regime was behind this brazen attack — as the overwhelming evidence presented by our allies and independent researchers suggests — then it must be held accountable.”
The congressmen pointed out that labs in Germany, France, and Sweden (along with tests by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) have all “confirmed” that Navalny was exposed to the Novichok nerve agent.
They also pointed to an October report by the European Union, which concluded that “this toxic agent is accessible only to State authorities in the Russian Federation.” The report also noted that, given all the circumstances, “it is reasonable to conclude” that his poisoning was “only possible with the consent” of the Presidential Executive Office of Vladimir Putin and that, when taking into account that Navalny was “under surveillance” by Russian intelligence when he was poisoned, “it is reasonable to conclude that the poisoning was only possible with the involvement of the Federal Security Service” — a successor agency to the KGB.
An investigation by the research group Bellingcat conducted jointly with The Insider with cooperation from Der Spiegel and CNN also “discovered voluminous telecom and travel data that implicates” the FSB in the Navalny poisoning. Navalny himself also claimed that he had tricked one of the Russian agents into admitting to the poisoning, releasing a purported video recording of the confession, which the FSB contended was fake.
Meeks and McCaul said that, in response to concluding Russia was responsible, “the European Union and the United Kingdom imposed sanctions on several Russian individuals believed to have played a role in the planning and execution of the poisoning, as well as a Russian state scientific research center accused of deploying the banned nerve agent.”
The sanctions targeted six key Russian officials along with the State Scientific Research Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology, which is supposed to be responsible for destroying chemical weapons inherited from the Soviet Union. Russia responded in December with travel bans on some European officials, and the European Parliament called for broader sanctions against Russia in January, as well as urging that the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline construction be ended.
Former President Donald Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the U.S. “strongly condemns” Navalny’s arrest on Sunday, and a State Department spokesperson said in December that “the United States believes that officers from the Russian Federal Security Service used a Novichok nerve agent to poison Mr. Navalny” and that “there is no plausible explanation for Mr. Navalny’s poisoning other than Russian government involvement and responsibility.”
Biden’s nominee for secretary of the State Department, Antony Blinken, said during his confirmation hearing Tuesday that “it’s extraordinary how frightened Putin is” of Navalny.
