On Friday morning, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin strolled into a White House briefing to announce new sanctions against Iran. Those sanctions were against not just members of the Iranian government that Pompeo described as “outlaws,” but also leading figures in manufacturing and construction. None of the moves seemed to be designed to de-escalate tensions with Iran or prevent the all-too-recently hot conflict from flaring up again.
But cranking up the economic pressure on Iran wasn’t the only topic of the press event. Pompeo spent a good part of the time dealing with his massively inconsistent and ridiculous statements about the intelligence behind the U.S. killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani. That included not just retroactively laying claim to an excuse that Donald Trump popped out on Thursday, but contradicting statements from members of Congress who attended the disastrous briefing on Wednesday.
When first asked about his definition of “imminent,” Pompeo responded with a sigh and a disgusted reply of “I knew this was going to happen.” He should have known. Since laying claim to the idea that Soleimani had to be taken out so quickly that there was no time to consult with either Congress or the Iraqi government, Pompeo has failed to produce one speck of evidence that there was any real reason that Soleimani had to go at that instant.
To show that Mike Pompeo has been all over the map when it comes to the intelligence behind the assassination of Qassem Soleimani would require a very big map. And to say that he’s shifted his definition of “imminent” at each appearance would be undercounting his shifts. That continued on Friday, as Pompeo first said that “imminent” meant “this was gonna happen,” then followed up by admitting, “I don't know completely which minute, we didn't know exactly which day it would've been executed." Then, incredibly, Pompeo immediately reverted to saying, “Qassem Soleimani himself was plotting a broad, large-scale attack against American interests, and those attacks were imminent—against American facilities, including American embassies, military bases, American facilities throughout the region."
This description does not match what Pompeo has said on previous occasions; it also absolutely does not match what lawmakers were told on Wednesday. Confronted about that briefing, and about Trump’s statement that Soleimani was going to “blow up the U.S. embassy,” Pompeo insisted that it had been included in the Thursday briefing. “We did,” said Pompeo. “Yes. We told them about the imminent threat.” And again Pompeo returned to the claim that the imminent threat included embassies, something that had not been mentioned until Trump dropped the claim into the middle of a rambling statement.
All of which directly contradicts not just Democratic members of Congress who attended the briefing, but also Republicans who came away calling it the “worst briefing ever.”
Pompeo’s claims that members of Congress were told about the threat to embassies—or given any details about the so-called imminent threat at all—flatly contradicted the statements of several lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. They certainly came as a surprise to Democratic House Intelligence Committee member Val Demmings, who wondered if Trump’s embassy claim had come from his own imagination. “Do you think that he had a nightmare and thought it was reality?” said Demmings. Demmings was definitive that lawmakers were not told about any threat to the U.S. embassy during the briefing.
In other words, it seems that Mike Pompeo walked out on Friday morning to correct his previous correction to his previous correction to his original claims about the intelligence behind the assassination. He also revised his statements in order to support a statement that Trump appeared to have summoned straight from his own ass.
But because Donald Trump cannot be allowed to be wrong, Pompeo walked out on Friday to simply lie both about the actual intelligence and about what lawmakers were told to their faces.