Donald Trump gives new justification for killing Qassem Soleimani: he said ‘bad things’ about US
- Trump said that officials counted down the last minutes of the general’s life as they watched the strike from ‘cameras that are miles in the sky’
- The president also erroneously claimed that Soleimani was meeting ‘the head of Hezbollah’ while in Baghdad
Trump spoke amid a brewing controversy in Washington, where some lawmakers, especially Democrats, have said the White House has repeatedly shifted its justification for the January 3 strike, which pushed Washington and Tehran to the brink of war.
The drone strike in Baghdad that killed Soleimani came days after a violent protest by Iranian-backed protesters at the US Embassy in Baghdad and a rocket attack that killed an American contractor at a facility in Iraq.
“What the President said was, he believed it probably could have been,” Esper said in a separate interview with CNN. “He did not cite intelligence.”
Trump on Monday said his administration has been “totally consistent” in its explanation of the intelligence that justified the strike.“ Here’s what’s been consistent: We killed Soleimani, the number-one terrorist in the world by every account,” Trump said. “Bad person.”
At Friday’s fundraiser, held at the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, Trump described the attack on Soleimani in vivid detail, according to the recording obtained by CNN. He said military officials counted down the last minutes of the Iranian general’s life as they watched the strike from “cameras that are miles in the sky.”
Trump says Iran’s Khamenei ‘should be very careful with his words’
The president also erroneously claimed – as he has before – that Soleimani was meeting “the head of Hezbollah” while in Baghdad.
Earlier in the day, Khamenei said Iran had delivered a “slap to the US’s image as a superpower” in a rare appearance leading Friday prayer in Tehran.