The chairman of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s panel reviewing the deadly 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan claimed on Wednesday it found “hidden” documents about the military operation in a safe.
Sean Parnell, who also serves as the Pentagon’s spokesperson, made the statement in a video tribute on the fifth anniversary of Abbey Gate, a terror attack at the Kabul airport that killed 13 U.S. service members. Parnell did not share the contents of the files, which he pitched as a bombshell discovery.
Parnell said the “highly relevant, classified documents” consisted of material “that should have been disclosed.” He said the documents had been “stashed and hidden away in safes where they would not be found.”
“And after the team reviewed these documents, it became clear why someone tried to hide them,” he said, without providing any further detail.
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The Pentagon did not immediately return a request for comment on the contents of the documents, where exactly they were found and if the federal government intended to make them public.
The message came hours before Hegseth held an event recognizing Marines with upgraded valor awards for their contributions to the operation. Parnell said during a short address that the service members should have received the valor awards in the past but didn’t because “the record did not fully reflect” their actions. The change came after the review panel’s probe progressed, Parnell said.
Hegseth tasked Parnell in May 2025 with leading the Afghanistan Withdrawal Special Review Panel, a new federal probe into the military operation that occurred under the Biden administration.
Congressional Republicans launched a separate probe into the operation in 2023, which resulted in a 200-page report released in September 2024 that accused the Biden administration of “creating an unsafe environment” that exposed federal government personnel to “lethal threats.” The report largely left out the role of President Donald Trump’s first administration in the lead-up to the withdrawal.
Parnell said in April that the new probe would be more comprehensive than the Republican-led effort that was commissioned under former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Parnell argued the first probe was “over-classified at the highest levels, which effectively kept the most critical and relevant information from public scrutiny.”
Parnell said his investigation had so far completed interviews with military figures involved in the planning and execution of the withdrawal, as well as reviewed 9 million documents.
It’s unclear when the panel’s findings will be made public.
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