For six days after Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani’s death, the Trump administration assured us he was behind “imminent” attacks but declined to offer details. Then Trump came out Thursday and just said it: The deceased Quds Force commander was going to “blow up” a U.S. embassy.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced a package of new Iran sanctions Friday, but unanswered questions about the strike on Soleimani loomed over it.
Particularly at issue was Trump’s claim about Soleimani targeting embassies. As I noted when he said it, that was very difficult to square with bipartisan claims that there was no real new evidence provided to members of Congress at a briefing Wednesday. And indeed, some Democratic senators said after Trump’s comments that the briefings included no such evidence about embassies. If that was the intelligence, how in the world would 1) it not be shared or 2) members not remember it?
Pompeo’s explanation doesn’t quite clear things up.
NBC News’s Peter Alexander asked him about the claims by the senators, and Pompeo initially seemed to directly dispute their claims and confirm that the briefing included the embassies:
Q: Why can you say that here, and the president can say it at a rally in Toledo, but no one said it to lawmakers behind closed doors in a classified setting, as multiple senators have since said?POMPEO: We did.
The answer seems clear enough, but then Alexander pressed him on it, making sure the embassy threat was included in the briefing.
At that point, Pompeo became less explicit and reverted to talking more broadly about how the administration shared information on the imminent threats:
Q: So the senators are lying when they say that — ?POMPEO: We told them about the imminent threat. All of the intelligence that we have briefed — that you’ve heard today, I assure you, in an unclassified setting, we’ve provided in the classified setting as well.Q: To be clear, you told them that embassies were ... to be targeted? That was the imminent threat?POMPEO: I’m not going to talk about the details of what we shared in the classified setting. But make no mistake about it: Those leaders, those members of Congress who want to go access this same intelligence can see that very same intelligence that will reflect what I’ve described to you and what the president said last night.
It wasn’t a complete walkback, but, given Pompeo’s initial response, it would have been easy to just confirm it. That Pompeo chose not to raises eyebrows — especially next to the claims of Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) that they weren’t briefed on the embassy threat.
Sen. Chris Coons on President Trump claiming Soleimani plotted to blow up the US Embassy: “It’s striking that that specific detail is now being offered up by President Trump when 100 US senators were gathered yesterday in a classified briefing." pic.twitter.com/IqEQ83kHgZ
— The Situation Room (@CNNSitRoom) January 10, 2020
Pompeo was also forced to account for his own commentary on the topic. He said Thursday night of the imminent attack, “We don’t know precisely when and we don’t know precisely where, but it was real.” CBS’s Paula Reid asked him to square that with the idea that we knew Soleimani was targeting embassies and thus apparently did know the “where.”
“Those are completely consistent thoughts,” Pompeo maintained. “I don’t know exactly which minute. We don’t know exactly which day it would’ve been executed. But it was very clear. Qasem Soleimani himself was plotting a broad, large-scale attack against American interests, and those attacks were imminent.”
History also plays a part here. Trump is known for falsehoods and misleading statements, uttering more than 15,000 as president. And this isn’t even the first time there are questions about whether he has accurately recounted the circumstances behind the death of a major adversary.
In October, after his administration took out the founder of the Islamic State militant group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Trump claimed in a vivid news conference that Baghdadi died “whimpering.” Trump said this despite there being very legitimate questions about how he knew that and whether it was even knowable. The New York Times labeled it “The ‘Whimpering’ Terrorist Only Trump Seems to Have Heard.” It seemed fair to ask whether Trump was making it up for dramatic effect.
The situation with Iran is even more serious, though, because it is not about dramatic license but about the actual justification for a major military strike.
Pompeo momentarily appeared to offer a firm denial, but he quickly — and quite conspicuously — watered that down.