On Thursday, Donald Trump dropped the bombshell that he had taken out Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani because "they were looking to blow up our embassy.” Whoa. That's some explosive intel, dropped nearly seven days after the fact. Purportedly, the threat of an attack wasn't just "imminent," it was site specific. Too bad none of the Trump administration's congressional briefers—the heads of the CIA, Pentagon, State Department, and White House national security adviser—bothered to mention it to lawmakers in their closed-door briefing a day earlier.
That stunning new detail was a lie, folks—a fanciful creation by Trump in the midst of a Trump-manufactured national crisis that brought us to the brink of war with Iran and for which we will certainly pay a price down the line through covert actions. But Trump didn't just drop it once, he repeated it Thursday night at an Ohio rally kicking off his reelection bid. In other words, Trump actually launched his 2020 campaign on a lie about the most decisive military action of his presidency. How perfect.
Early Friday morning Secretary of State Mike Pompeo got a chance to back up Trump's embassy assertion on Fox News and instead he destroyed it. "There is no doubt that there were a series of imminent attacks that were being plotted by Qassem Soleimani. We don't know precisely when and we don't know precisely where, but it was real," Pompeo said.
Huh, don't know "where," you say. What about Trump's embassy claim, specifically? "Uhh, it was [Soleimani's] forces that penetrated our embassy just a handful of days before that. [...] I don't think there's any doubt that Soleimani had intentions not only to take actions against our forces, our diplomats in Iraq, but in other countries around the region as well."
So now the protests at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad days earlier are proof that Soleimani was going to "blow up" the joint? Just to be clear, Pompeo stuttered at the outset of that answer. How about a do-over for Pompeo in the White House briefing room a few hours later.
Q: This morning you said we didn't know precisely when and we didn't know precisely where—that's not the definition of imminent. [...] Do you have information about an imminent threat and did it have anything to do with our embassies?
Pompeo: "We had specific information on an imminent threat and those threats included attacks on U.S. embassies, period, full stop."
Well, there's the cleanup direct from the guy who did a round of Sunday talk shows a couple months ago lying about his presence on Trump's now-infamous phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Just amazing that Pompeo was one of the briefers making the rounds this week with congressional lawmakers and failed to ever mention it.
Then again, it's been like this from the start. When the assassination took place last week Thursday, the administration didn't have any spokespeople prepared to do interviews. Trump officials then had the weekend to get their stories straight. Here's how that worked out.
Sunday, Pompeo on NBC's Meet the Press
Q: So was the justification in that he's been a destabilizing force for so long or was the justification an imminent threat?
Pompeo: "It's never one thing. [...] It's never one moment. It's never one instance. It's a collective, it's a full situational awareness of risk."
Sunday, Pompeo on CNN's State of the Union
Q: How imminent were they? Days, weeks?
Pompeo: "If you're an American in the region, days and weeks, this is not something that's relevant. We have to prepare, we have to be ready, and we took a bad guy off the battle field."
Tuesday, Defense Secretary Mark Esper press briefing
Q: Can you clarify, the attack Soleimani was planning, was that days or weeks away?
Esper: "I think it's more fair to say days, for sure. [...] It was clearly on the battlefield, he was conducting, preparing, planning military operations. He was a legitimate target and his time was due."
So at first, nothing specific, per se. Just a gut-level "awareness." Days, weeks? "Not relevant." Soleimani was a "bad guy." Except, it was "days, for sure." Totally "legitimate," trust us. Actually, on second thought, "We don't know precisely when and we don't know precisely where." But it was so "real." Indeed, so real, it was "the U.S. embassy." And actually, not just the one, it was "U.S. embassies [plural], period, full stop." Got that?
As former FBI assistant director Frank Figliuzzi told MSNBC Thursday, "Just in these clips, we've gone from imminent threat to days, weeks, and 'you know what, he was a bad guy and he had it coming.' So we can no longer trust this White House—even when the consequences are as grave as potential war—to tell us anything approximating the truth."
Even when it comes to war, the Trump administration never lets the truth get in the way of a cascading series of lies.
Below are several clips from this week’s lie-fest.