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Trump Suggests Reason Why Administration Did Not Alert Congress On Soleimani Strike

   DailyWire.com
US President Donald Trump speaks during a "Keep America Great" campaign rally at Huntington Center in Toledo, Ohio, on January 9, 2020.
SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

President Donald Trump suggested in a Fox News interview that aired on Friday night that part of the reason the administration did not alert Congress about the military strike on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, a terrorist, was that Democratic members of Congress could not be trusted with the information.

“Are you worried that the Democrats can’t be trusted with classified information?” Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked Trump in an exclusive interview. “Because that’s kind of what it sounded like when Pence gave that interview and talked about sources and methods the other day.”

Ingraham was referring to remarks that Vice President Mike Pence made on Fox News this week where he said, “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. I can assure your viewers that there was a threat of an imminent attack.”

“I am worried about it, certainly. I am worried about it. Can you imagine?” Trump responded. “Here we are, split-second timing, executed – like nobody’s seen in many, many years – on Soleimani? Can you imagine they want us to call out and speak to crooked corrupt politician Adam Schiff?”

“Oh, Adam, we have somebody that we’ve been trying to get for a long time. We have a shot at him right now. Could we meet so that we can get your approval, Adam Schiff?” Trump said. “And he’d say, ‘well, let’s do it in a couple of days.’ Oh, okay, let’s wait a couple – it doesn’t work that way, number one.”

“Number two, they leak. Anything we give will be leaked immediately,” Trump continued. “You’ll see breaking news, we’re about to attack in 25 minutes or do something. And by the way, I’m not somebody that wants to attack. I probably could’ve attacked five times, ten times having to do with Iran. I’ve been very guarded because I don’t want to do that.”

“But we may have to do something,” Trump added. “We have to be in a position where we can do it even from the negotiating standpoint. But hopefully it won’t be necessary. We have tremendous sanctions. They’re doing very poorly. They have riots all over their country. And they can straighten it out easy but it’s up to them.”

In an interview with The Daily Wire, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) also suggested that part of reason that U.S. officials were hesitant to share information with members of Congress about the intelligence that the U.S. Intelligence Community had on Soleimani was that they were concerned that certain members of Congress would leak it to the media or America’s enemies.

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.”

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