A sweeping Pentagon review of the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan will declassify interview transcripts, internal documents, and findings from prior investigations that officials say the Biden administration kept under wraps, according to the adviser leading the effort.
Stu Scheller, a Pentagon adviser and former Marine officer who was jailed after publicly demanding accountability over the chaotic exit, told Fox News Digital that the review is expected to be released in roughly three months. The Trump administration ordered the new examination in May 2025 as part of what officials described as a push for accountability over a withdrawal that killed 13 American service members and more than 150 Afghans at Abbey Gate in Kabul.
The effort goes well beyond what any prior inquiry has made public. Scheller said his team has spoken with senior generals, interviewed thousands of rank-and-file troops, and examined a broader set of records than earlier probes, records he says were deliberately overclassified to shield decision-makers from scrutiny.
Scheller framed the coming report as a corrective to what he described as a pattern of concealment under the previous administration. He told Fox News Digital:
“We plan to declassify all of the documents that we source in this investigation, all the interview transcripts, all the previous investigations that the Biden administration did that have been overclassified.”
He added a pointed follow-up:
“We’re going to declassify all of it so that everyone can make assessments for themselves.”
That promise matters because the Biden administration’s own internal reviews never produced the kind of public reckoning that Gold Star families and congressional investigators demanded. The administration defended its handling of the withdrawal, arguing the decision ended America’s longest war and prevented further U.S. casualties, while accusing critics of politicizing the issue. A spokesperson for former President Joe Biden did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
President Trump has repeatedly described the withdrawal as “a Biden disaster” and “the lowest point in the history of our country.” The new review appears designed to document, in granular detail, why he and many military families reached that conclusion.
The Pentagon effort builds on work already done on Capitol Hill. A Republican-led House Foreign Affairs Committee report found that the State Department failed to develop a plan to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies despite mounting warnings that Kabul could fall. The committee found that U.S. officials delayed evacuation efforts until the Taliban entered the capital.
Perhaps more damning, the same report said U.S. officials were tracking credible threats of a suicide attack in the days leading up to the Abbey Gate bombing, including intelligence pointing to a potential ISIS-K attack at the airport, but operations at the gate continued. Thirteen Marines, soldiers, and a Navy corpsman died. More than 150 Afghan civilians perished alongside them.
The pattern of senior leaders who privately opposed the withdrawal plan but executed it anyway has drawn sustained criticism. National Review reported that General Austin “Scott” Miller advised keeping a few thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan and warned the Afghan government could collapse quickly after a full pullout. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Chairman Mark Milley, and General Kenneth McKenzie reportedly agreed with recommendations against a complete withdrawal, but Biden was unpersuaded.
The disconnect between what the generals recommended behind closed doors and what they carried out in public is precisely the kind of failure the new review appears poised to document. Scheller told Breitbart that Biden ordered a rapid troop drawdown before American citizens were evacuated, reducing forces from about 2,500 to roughly 650 troops, and that general officers failed to push back.
As Scheller put it: “There’s been no senior military leaders that have assumed any type of accountability, or our politicians. I mean, the whole, the whole system failed.”
Scheller’s own story is inseparable from the review he now leads. In August 2021, then a lieutenant commanding an infantry training unit at Camp Lejeune, he posted a viral video in uniform demanding accountability from senior leaders over the withdrawal. The video resonated with millions of Americans who watched the chaos at Kabul’s airport in real time.
The Pentagon’s response was swift, but it targeted the whistleblower, not the generals. Scheller was relieved of command, placed in pretrial confinement, and later pleaded guilty at a court-martial. The broader pattern of Washington leaders distancing themselves from inconvenient truths was on full display.
Scheller has spoken candidly about the personal cost. He told Fox News Digital he felt compelled to act because no one else would.
“I just felt like there wasn’t another voice that was going to advocate for the emperor’s not wearing clothes.”
He added: “I didn’t do it haphazardly.” And reflecting on his path from confinement to the Pentagon: “God was with me on that one. I got through it. Here I am influencing the changes I originally pointed out.”
The trajectory, from jailed Marine to Pentagon adviser tasked with the very accountability review he once demanded, is remarkable. It also raises a question the Biden-era defense establishment never wanted asked: if Scheller was wrong, why is the Pentagon now doing exactly what he called for?
One early outcome of the review has already surfaced. Scheller said his team focused initially on the unit stationed at Abbey Gate and discovered that several Marines had been nominated for higher awards that were later downgraded during the approval process.
The upgrades affected Marines from Company G, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines. In some cases, commendation medals were elevated to include valor devices. In one instance, a Bronze Star was upgraded to reflect combat heroism. Scheller emphasized that his team did not invent the recognitions from scratch.
“They had actually submitted awards that were downgraded. So we didn’t create these awards out of nothing. All seven of these awards were submitted and we had the formal paperwork from the original write-up.”
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell confirmed the corrections, as Newsmax reported, stating that the original awards “did not reflect that reality” and calling the upgrades a correction of “that injustice.” Parnell said the Marines “remained at their posts under threat of imminent assault with minimal cover and helped save lives during the Abbey Gate bombing attack.”
That these men waited years for proper recognition, while the officials who sent them into harm’s way without adequate planning faced no consequences, captures the accountability gap the review is meant to address. The same government that mismanaged billions in defense spending under Biden couldn’t be bothered to properly honor the troops who held the line at Abbey Gate.
Scheller indicated the review’s scope extends far beyond senior leadership. His team interviewed thousands of young service members, the men and women who lived through the withdrawal on the ground.
Their message was consistent, and it was bleak. Scheller told Fox News Digital:
“One of the things they said was that they didn’t feel like their experiences were validated.”
That single sentence carries enormous weight. These are troops who watched a withdrawal collapse around them, who lost friends at Abbey Gate, and who then watched as the administration that put them in that position spent years insisting it had made the right call. The Biden administration’s posture, defending the exit as a necessary end to a long war, left little room for the men and women who bore the cost of how that exit was executed.
The broader political context only deepens the sense that the previous administration preferred to move on rather than account for what happened. Biden’s own party has shown little interest in defending his legacy, and the former president’s silence on the review speaks for itself.
The review still raises significant unanswered questions. The exact release date remains unspecified beyond “roughly three months.” The formal title of the review, the specific Pentagon office conducting it, and the identities of the generals interviewed have not been disclosed. Nor has Scheller detailed which specific prior investigations will be declassified or what classified materials will be included beyond interview transcripts and internal documents.
The outcome of Scheller’s own court-martial, the specific sentence he received, also remains unaddressed in available reporting. What is clear is that the man the military punished for demanding answers is now in a position to compel them.
Whether the final report leads to formal consequences for senior leaders remains to be seen. Scheller offered a simple, direct promise: “There will be accountability.”
The families of 13 dead Americans, and the thousands of troops who felt their experiences were never validated, have waited four years to hear those words from someone with the authority to back them up. The Biden family may have moved on, but the people who lived through that August in Kabul have not.
Accountability delayed is not the same as accountability denied, but only if someone finally delivers the receipts. The Pentagon says it will. The country is watching.
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