President Donald Trump gave the order to kill Iran’s top military leader seven months ago in response to Iran’s continued aggression against the United States in the Mideast, according to current and former senior administration officials.
The June order to kill Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' elite Quds Force, was conditioned upon Trump giving the final approval for the operation, according to reports by NBC News.
After Iran shot down a U.S. drone in June, Trump's advisers urged the president to retaliate by taking out Soleimani, reports said. Trump initially refused, saying he would only sign off on the mission to kill Soleimani only if Iran “hit Americans,” according to NBC News, which cited high-level officials familiar with the discussions.
Taking out Soleimani was one of a list of options given to Trump in response to recent attacks by Iranian proxy forces in Iraq that killed a U.S. contractor and wounded four other Americans, according to officials’ reports. Those same proxy forces were also believed responsible for attacking the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on New Year's Eve.
“There have been a number of options presented to the president over the course of time," a senior administration official told NBC News.
When the U.S. drone strike was finally carried out Jan. 3, the U.S. justified its actions by claiming Soleimani had been planning other imminent attacks on Americans and had to be stopped immediately.
The revelation of Trump's June order is now raising serious questions about the timing and justification of Soleimani's killing.
U.S. officials say they had to kill Soleimani because he was planning an “imminent” attack but have not clearly stated how “imminent” an attack was.
Reasoning questioned
The sharp disparity between the president and his defense secretary added to the public debate over the Jan. 3 strike and whether there was sufficient justification for the operation.
For 10 days, Trump and his team have struggled to describe the reasoning behind the decision to launch a drone strike against Soleimani, propelling the two nations to the brink of war. Officials agree they had intelligence indicating danger, but public explanations have shifted by the day and sometimes by the hour.
Mark Esper disagrees with Donald Trump
On Sunday came the latest twist.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper said he was never shown any specific piece of evidence that Iran was planning an attack on four U.S. embassies as Trump had claimed two days earlier.
“The president didn't cite a specific piece of evidence. What he said was he believed,” Esper said Sunday on “Face the Nation.” “I didn't see one, with regard to four embassies. What I'm saying is that I shared the president's view that probably — my expectation was they were going to go after our embassies. The embassies are the most prominent display of American presence in a country.”
The mood on Capitol Hill
While agreeing that Soleimani was generally a threat, Democrats in Congress, as well as some Republicans, have said the administration has not provided evidence even in classified briefings to back up the claim of an “imminent” attack, nor has it mentioned that four embassies were targeted. Even some Pentagon officials have said privately that they were unaware of any intelligence suggesting that a large-scale attack was in the offing.
Claims about an imminent attack have also generated doubts because no attack in the Middle East during the last two decades has ever resulted in so many American casualties at once.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah and one of the administration’s most outspoken Republican critics after the strike, said on CNN that he worried about the quality of the information that national security officials were sharing with Congress and had not “been able to yet ascertain specific details of the imminence of the attack.”
Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Speaker Nancy Pelosi struck a similar tone. And on “Face the Nation,” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, accused the president and his top aides of “fudging” the intelligence.
“Frankly, I think what they are doing is overstating and exaggerating what the intelligence shows,” Schiff said.
— This story contains reporting by Peter Baker and Thomas Gibbons-Neff of The New York Times.
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