President Donald Trump told associates that he assassinated Iran’s top military leader in part to appease Republican senators who’ll play a crucial role in his upcoming Senate impeachment trial.
IgbereTV gathered from Wall Street Journal reports on Friday that the president’s top advisers coalesced behind the strike on Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. According to the Journal reports, Trump said he felt “under pressure” to satisfy senators who were pushing for stronger US action against Soleimani and who will run defense for him on impeachment.
One of Trump’s most outspoken supporters, GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham was reportedly the only congressional lawmaker Trump briefed about his plan to assassinate Soleimani in the days leading up to the strike.
“I was briefed about the potential operation when I was down in Florida,” Graham told Fox News. “I appreciate being brought into the orbit.”
The South Carolina Republican is an Iran hawk and celebrated the controversial strike, which the administration did not seek congressional authorization to carry out. After Iran retaliated by hitting US-occupied Iraqi bases on Tuesday, Graham called the move “an act of war.”
Graham has criticized the president’s foreign policy choices in the past most notably Trump’s withdrawal of troops from northern Syria and his handling of Saudi Arabia following the country’s murder of a US resident journalist.
Publicly, Trump has said he approved the strike on Soleimani to prevent an “imminent attack” the general was plotting, including to bomb the US embassy in Iraq .
But the administration hasn’t released any evidence to support the claim that Iran was planning at attack on the embassy or any other imminent attack.
During an interview with Fox News on Thursday night, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the Trump administration didn’t know “precisely when” or “where” an allegedly imminent Iranian attack would occur.
Democratic and a few Republican lawmakers were infuriated by a classified briefing they received from the Trump administration on Wednesday concerning the US strike that killed Soleimani and a top Iraqi militant leader.
The lawmakers said they weren’t provided any evidence of an imminent and specific threat posed by Soleimani evidence of which is required to legally launch an attack without prior congressional authorization.
Republican Sen. Mike Lee called the briefing, which Pompeo helped lead, “probably the worst briefing, at least on a military issue, I’ve seen in nine years I’ve been here.”
