President Trump said Friday that the Iranian general of high rank killed by a US drone attack had been planning attacks against four embassies in this country, according to The Washington Post . This is a claim made to justify the decision, but I disagreed with the intelligence assessments of senior Trump administration officials.
Trump and his top advisors have been under increasing pressure from lawmakers on both sides to share more details about the Intelligence reports that, they say, showed that Qasem Soleimani, the elite chief of the Iran Quds Force, I was planning imminent attacks against US personnel in the Middle East. On Trump's order, Soleimani was killed last week in an attack with drones, which caused Iran to fire a ballistic missile discharge this week at bases in Iraq that house US soldiers.
In an interview with Laura Ingraham of Fox News, whose excerpts were published Friday afternoon, Trump extended the comments a day earlier, when he initially told reporters that Soleimani's forces "sought to blow up our embassy" in Baghdad. He later said at a rally in Toledo that "Soleimani was actively planning new attacks, and was aiming very seriously at our embassies, and not only at the embassy in Baghdad."
"[Soleimani] had planned large-scale attacks for other embassies?" Ingraham asked. "And if they were planned, why can't we reveal that to the American people? Wouldn't that help your case?" "I can reveal that I think there would probably have been four embassies," Trump said.
But a senior administration official and a senior defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss classified information, said they were only aware of vague intelligence reports about a plot against the embassy in Baghdad and that the information did not suggest a completely formed plot. None of the officials said there had been threats against multiple embassies.
The senior defense official did not directly contradict Trump, but said he was concerned that there might be an attempt to place a bomb at the Baghdad embassy, a heavily fortified structure in a secure area of the Iraqi capital.
The senior administration official said Trump has become obsessed with not allowing an attack against a US diplomatic installation. UU., For fear of being unfavorably compared to its predecessor.
Trump is "totally obsessed with not letting something like Benghazi happen to him," the official said, referring to the 2012 attack on a US facility in Libya that has reached a totemic state among Trump's allies, who see it as evidence of the former President Barack Obama alleged weakness in the face of terrorism.
The embassy in Baghdad did not receive an alert according to the threat Trump described, said a person familiar with the situation, who was not authorized to comment publicly. When the US government UU. It has specific information about threats to embassies, warnings or alerts are often sent to embassy staff so they are alert. The State Department did not answer questions about whether alerts were transmitted to the four embassies that Trump claimed were in danger.
Trump's comments are likely to feed calls to his administration to deliver more classified Intelligence documents to lawmakers, who have enraged that the administration has withheld basic information about the president's justification for military action against one of the leaders. important of Iran. Administration officials have offered changing explanations of what caused the decision to attack Soleimani, sometimes describing the threat he posed as "imminent," while suggesting that the timeline could have been days or weeks.
Some lawmakers who received a classified briefing on Wednesday said they heard nothing about a threat to US embassies by Soleimani.
"I feel I would have remembered if they had presented that kind of information in the briefing," Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said in an interview on Friday. "It seems to me that the administration is panicking a bit about the strength of its justification and is deciding to share information with Fox News that they are not willing to share with Congress."
Murphy said the informants, who included Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper, CIA Director Gina Haspel and the President of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark A. Milley, mentioned the Baghdad embassy alone in the context of the protests that occurred. there at the end of December after a US attack on a group of militiamen who had killed a US citizen in a rocket attack.
"If they had presented threats about four embassies, there would have been a very different disposition of the senators who came out of that briefing session," Murphy said. Speaking of the president, he added: "I don't trust what he said."
Senator Mike Lee (a Republican from Utah) had previously criticized officials for what he described as a poor presentation that was more concerned with conversation points than with evidence.
"What I found so distressing about the briefing is that one of the messages we received from the speakers was: 'Don't argue, don't discuss the issue of the convenience of further military intervention against Iran,' and if you do, ' You will embolden Iran, '' Lee told reporters on Thursday.
"Imminent threat"
At the White House on Friday, Pompeo was pressured on Intelligence and affirmed Trump's statement in the statement that embassies were in danger.
"We had specific information about an imminent threat, and those threats included attacks on US embassies throughout the period," Pompeo told reporters at an informational session about the new sanctions imposed on Iran for its attack with missiles
When asked again if the threat was against a single embassy, Pompeo replied: "Against US facilities, including US embassies, military bases, US facilities throughout the region." CIA spokespersons and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.
Pompeo was also asked if he had undermined the administration's own arguments when he said Thursday that, although the Iranian attack was imminent, he did not know where or when it would occur.
"Those are completely consistent thoughts," Pompeo said. "I don't know exactly at what minute. We don't know exactly what day it would have been executed, but it was very clear: Qasem Soleimani himself was plotting a large-scale broad attack against American interests. And those attacks were imminent."
Pompeo defended the administration's presentation to legislators. "We tell you about the imminent threat. All the Intelligence reports that we have revealed, which you have heard today, I assure you that, in an unclassified environment, we also provide it in the classified environment," he said.
That was contrary to the statements of several Democratic senators who attended Wednesday's briefing, who said they had not been given that information from administration officials.
Democratic Senator Christopher A. Coons speaking on CNN said the administration did not offer any strong evidence to senators that Soleimani had been targeting the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Democratic Senator Tom Udall made similar comments during an MSNBC interview.
"We didn't hear about the embassy explosion yesterday in that briefing, and I sat from beginning to end," Democratic Senator Edward J. Markey said on MSNBC . “And then, if that was the threat, if it was imminent, if it was going to happen within a couple of days, they had every opportunity for 75 minutes to inform us of that. And that would have thrown all this into a different light because we had so much diplomatic and military personnel that I would have been in danger. "
Murphy said administration officials were repeatedly asked about the nature of the Intelligence documents, but refused to offer more details. “I left that briefing with the belief that they were going to kill Soleimani for sending a message to the Iranians. They suggested they had the authority to do so without an imminent threat, ”said Murphy. "They received very specific questions about an imminent threat, and could not answer them."
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