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Mo Brooks: Officials Appeared To Withhold Soleimani Intel Due To Concern Some Might Leak To Enemies

   DailyWire.com
UNITED STATES - OCTOBER 23: Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., talks with reporters in the Capitol Visitor Center outside the Laura Cooper, deputy assistant secretary of defense, deposition related to the House's impeachment inquiry on Wednesday, October 23, 2019. The Republican members were calling for access to the deposition.
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) said on Thursday that U.S. intelligence community officials appeared to withhold sensitive information that they possessed involving the information that President Donald Trump was given when he decided to take out top Iranian terrorist Qassem Soleimani.

In a tweet, Brooks wrote: “USA kills Sulaimani. Kudos! After 40 years, about time USA fights back against Iran terrorists. In classified briefing, it appeared defense & intelligence reps held back info out of concern too many Congressmen can’t be trusted to keep classified info from USA enemies. Sad! Mo.”

In an interview with The Daily Wire, Brooks described the meeting that Congress had with U.S. officials where Congress was briefed on the strike.

Brooks said, “There were questions asked for specific information and the people on the dais simply did everything they could to get around providing the specific information, which allowed the inference that they had reservations about sharing that classified information with Congress in that kind of setting — which in turn leads to the inference that they had a reasonable amount of distrust as to whether shared classified information would in turn be shared by members of Congress with the news media or our enemies.”

Brooks pointed to a statement that Vice President Mike Pence gave to Fox News on Thursday as further evidence that U.S. officials wanted to withhold information because they were worried about protecting sources and methods.

“To protect sources and methods, we’re simply not able to share with every member of the House and Senate the intelligence that supported the president’s decision to take out Qassem Soleimani,” Pence told Fox News. “I can assure your viewers that there was a threat of an imminent attack.”

Responding to Pence’s statement, Brooks said, “That’s very consistent with the concern that Congress cannot be trusted to keep classified information classified.”

“[It’s] also consistent with that concern is what you just got done seeing with Adam Schiff’s Intelligence Committee during the impeachment proceedings wherein that information that was collected in a SCIF was invariably leaked to the news media,” Brooks continued. “So if you just had that experience where members of Congress are quite clearly leaking information that was collected in a SCIF environment, how can you trust them not to leak classified information regarding Iran that could lead to the deaths of our intelligence sources, or empower terrorist organizations to avoid American retribution for the killing that they have done?”

Brooks concluded by telling The Daily Wire, “Quite clearly, there are some more visible members of Congress that caused greater concerns that others, but I’ll leave to you and the general public to figure out which ones those are.”

During a press conference on Thursday, Trump told reporters: “We caught a total monster and we took him out and that should have happened a long time ago. We did it because they were looking to blow up our embassy.”

“We also did it for other reasons that were very obvious, somebody died, one of our military people died, people badly wounded, just a week before, and we did it,” Trump continued. “And we had a shot at him and I took it and that shot was pinpoint accurate and that was the end of a monster. Really, that was the second attack. We didn’t start it, they started it by killing one of our people and wounding badly other of our people. That you call retribution.”

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