Internal emails show the Pentagon was not notified by the White House before it issued a warning last summer that Syria would “pay a heavy price” over chemical weapons use, BuzzFeed news reported Wednesday.
Pentagon chief spokeswoman Dana White sent an email immediately after the White House’s June 2017 statement saying there was no coordination with military leaders and the State Department, and she learned about the threat when it was posted online, according to the news site. BuzzFeed said the emails were obtained through a records request by the watchdog group Democracy Forward.
“We woke up to the statement. WH did not coord with us or JS (Joint Chiefs) or State from what I can tell,” White wrote in the published email exchange.
Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, who was a Pentagon spokesman at the time, wrote in an email to reporters “I have nothing” and told a Joint Chiefs of Staff official that the Syria statement “surprised us all.”
“I suppose we send queries back to the White House,” Davis wrote.
The tranche of email traffic also shows the Pentagon and the White House misled the press and the public about the lack of coordination, claiming they had discussed the Syria threat beforehand.
White told a reporter with the far-right website Breitbart that claims the building was caught by surprise were false and said the military had actually provided edits to the Syria statement.
“DOD knew about the White House statement and provided edits in advance of its release. Anonymous leaks to the contrary are false or misinformed,” White wrote in an email.
White also told the Pentagon’s own press officers that the Syria statement was “coordinated between the principals” and that “the WH gets to do whatever it wants.”
Meanwhile, Sarah Sanders, who was a deputy White House press secretary at the time, told the press that “the military chain of command was also fully aware of the statement as it was being prepared and later released,” according to BuzzFeed.
The statement from June 26 of last year came two months after President Trump ordered a Tomahawk cruise missile strike on a Syria airfield as punishment for the regime’s use of chemical weapons.
“The United States has identified potential preparations for another chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime that would likely result in the mass murder of civilians, including innocent children,” the White House statement said, explicitly comparing the situation to the earlier strike. “As we have previously stated, the United States is in Syria to eliminate the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. If, however, Mr. Assad conducts another mass murder attack using chemical weapons, he and his military will pay a heavy price.”
