No imminent threat cited in memo on killing Iran general
WASHINGTON — The White House told Congress on Friday that President Donald Trump authorized the strike last month that killed Iran’s most important general to respond to attacks that had already taken place and deter future ones, contradicting the president’s claim that he acted in response to an imminent threat.
In a legally mandated, two-page unclassified memo to lawmakers, the White House asserted that the strike that killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani was “in response to an escalating series of attacks in preceding months” by Iran and Iran-backed militias.
“The purposes of this action were to protect United States personnel, to deter Iran from conducting or supporting further attacks against United States forces and interests, to degrade Iran’s and Quds Force-backed militias’ ability to conduct attacks, and to end Iran’s strategic escalation of attacks,” said the report, which was transmitted Friday to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The document confirmed what lawmakers had privately suspected as the Trump administration has offered a shifting set of justifications for the strike against Soleimani in Baghdad — taken with no congressional consultation — that brought the United States and Iran to the brink of war.
“This official report directly contradicts the president’s false assertion that he attacked Iran to prevent an imminent attack against United States personnel and embassies,” Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement. “The administration’s explanation in this report makes no mention of any imminent threat and shows that the justification the president offered to the American people was false, plain and simple.”
In the days after the strike that killed Soleimani, administration officials gave a variety of rationales for the action as they confronted questions about why the president undertook such a provocative move that could incite an escalation with a dangerous rival.
Trump and other top officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said the strike was conducted in response to imminent threats to American lives, but they declined to provide any evidence, leaving lawmakers in both parties irate.
Pressed over several days, Pompeo conceded that the United States did not have specific intelligence on where or when an attack would take place. Trump claimed that four U.S. embassies had been targeted for attacks, but under questioning during a television interview, Mark Esper, secretary of defense, said he had seen no evidence of that.
Trump later insisted on Twitter that Soleimani had, in fact, been planning an imminent attack on U.S. forces but added, “it doesn’t really matter because of his horrible past!”
The report Friday came a day after the Senate passed a resolution aimed at restraining Trump’s warmaking powers with Iran. The rare bipartisan vote illustrated the depth of the skepticism in both parties about the president’s strategy and lawmakers’ frustration with the administration’s refusal to consult Congress on military matters.
The House is expected to pass the measure soon, sending it to the president’s desk. Trump’s advisers have said he will veto it.
The White House infuriated lawmakers in early January when it sent Congress a formal notification, required under the War Powers Act, of the drone strikes. Lawmakers had expected it to lay out a legal justification for the strike, but the entire document was classified, and officials who read it said it contained no information on future threats or an imminent attack.
Lawmakers were further angered by a series of briefings delivered by top administration officials that they described as insulting and demeaning.