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, Pentagon adviser Stu Scheller told Fox News Digital. The review, ordered in May 2025, is expected within roughly three months.
Scheller, the Marine officer who posted a viral video in August 2021 demanding accountability from senior leaders and paid for it with his career, is now helping lead the effort. He described an investigation that has already reached generals and thousands of rank-and-file troops, with a focus on the unit that held Abbey Gate the day a suicide bomber killed 13 American service members and more than 150 Afghans.
The promise is straightforward: every sourced document, every interview transcript, every previously classified finding will be made public. If Scheller and his team deliver, the American people will finally get to judge for themselves what went wrong in Kabul, and who let it happen.
Scheller did not hedge when describing the scope. 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."
That word, "overclassified", carries weight. Previous investigations by Congress and federal watchdogs identified a range of failures in planning and executing the withdrawal. A Republican-led House Foreign Affairs Committee report found the State Department failed to develop a plan to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies despite mounting warnings that Kabul could fall. The same report said U.S. officials were tracking credible threats of a suicide attack, including intelligence pointing to a potential ISIS-K strike at the airport, in the days before the Abbey Gate bombing.
Yet much of the underlying evidence remained locked behind classification markings. The new review aims to strip those barriers away.
Scheller added bluntly: "We're going to declassify all of it so that everyone can make assessments for themselves."
That stands in sharp contrast to how the Biden administration handled the aftermath. Biden officials defended their 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 immediately respond to a request for comment on the new review.
Scheller's own story is inseparable from the events he is now investigating. In August 2021, as the chaotic evacuation unfolded, Scheller, then a lieutenant commanding an infantry training unit at Camp Lejeune, posted a video in uniform demanding accountability from senior military leaders over the withdrawal. The video went viral.
The Marine Corps did not reward his candor. Scheller was relieved of command, placed in pretrial confinement, and later pleaded guilty at a court-martial. His career as a Marine was over.
He described the decision to speak out in terms that will resonate with anyone who has watched institutions close ranks. "I just felt like there wasn't another voice that was going to advocate for the emperor's not wearing clothes," Scheller said. "I didn't do it haphazardly."
Now, as a Pentagon adviser, he frames his position with a sense of vindication: "God was with me on that one. I got through it. Here I am influencing the changes I originally pointed out."
The Pentagon has faced its share of internal controversies in recent months, including leak allegations and credibility questions that tested public trust in the Defense Department's transparency. Scheller's pledge to open the books on Afghanistan represents a different kind of test, whether the institution can look honestly at its own failures.
The review's reach goes well beyond the generals. Scheller said his team focused early on Company G, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines, the unit stationed at Abbey Gate when the bomb detonated.
"We've talked to many people, all the key generals... and we also interviewed thousands of young service members," Scheller said.
What those service members told investigators carries its own indictment of how the prior administration handled the aftermath. Scheller described a common refrain from the troops: "One of the things they said was that they didn't feel like their experiences were validated."
That failure of recognition extended to formal awards. The review has already resulted in upgrades for Marines from Company G, including cases where commendation medals were elevated to include valor devices and, in one instance, a Bronze Star was upgraded to reflect combat heroism. Scheller emphasized these were not fabricated honors.
"They had actually submitted awards that were downgraded. So we didn't create these awards out of nothing," he said. "All seven of these awards were submitted and we had the formal paperwork from the original write-up."
Seven awards. All seven had been submitted through proper channels. All seven were downgraded. The review restored what should never have been taken away.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly described the Afghanistan withdrawal as "a Biden disaster" and "the lowest point in the history of our country." The May 2025 order for a new Pentagon review is part of what officials described as a broader push for accountability.
The timing matters. House Democrats have spent recent months targeting Pentagon leadership with political maneuvers of their own, but none of those efforts have addressed the unresolved questions from the withdrawal itself. The contrast is telling: one side is filing political paperwork; the other is declassifying records.
The Biden administration's defense, that ending the war prevented further casualties, has always sat uneasily alongside the fact that 13 service members died in the final days precisely because the exit was so poorly planned and executed. The House Foreign Affairs Committee found that intelligence warnings about an ISIS-K attack at the airport were circulating in the days before the bombing. The State Department had no evacuation plan for Americans and Afghan allies even as Kabul's fall became increasingly likely.
Those findings came from congressional investigators working with whatever documents they could obtain. The Pentagon review promises access to a broader set of records, including the classified material that previous investigators could not fully examine.
Current Pentagon leadership has signaled a willingness to reassess strategic priorities across multiple theaters. The Afghanistan review fits that pattern: a Defense Department willing to reopen files rather than bury them.
For all the promises of transparency, significant questions remain. The exact scope and formal title of the review have not been publicly disclosed. Which specific prior investigations will be declassified? Which generals were interviewed, and what did they say? The names of the Marines whose awards were upgraded have not been released.
The review's credibility will ultimately depend on whether the declassified materials are released in full or selectively. Scheller's pledge, "all of it", sets a high bar. If the Pentagon meets it, the public will have an unprecedented window into how decisions were made, who made them, and what warnings were ignored.
If it falls short, the review risks becoming just another Washington report that generates headlines and changes nothing. The families of the 13 fallen service members deserve better than that. So do the thousands of troops who served at Abbey Gate and across the broader withdrawal operation.
The Abbey Gate bombing on August 26, 2021, marked the deadliest day for U.S. forces in Afghanistan in years. The images from Hamid Karzai International Airport, evacuees packed onto C-17 cargo planes, British and American forces struggling to maintain order among desperate crowds, remain seared into the national memory. So does the knowledge that someone, somewhere in the chain of command, had the intelligence about the threat and failed to act on it decisively.
Scheller's own journey, from a Marine officer who lost his career for demanding answers to a Pentagon adviser leading the investigation, is itself a measure of how far the pendulum has swung. Whether the review delivers the accountability he promised depends on what those declassified documents actually show.
Accountability delayed is accountability denied. Three months is a long time to wait, but four years of overclassified silence was longer.