President Trump protected American troops by keeping House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the dark about the raid that killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, a Senate Republican said.
“If you’re worried about our troops, you can tell that, I mean — Pelosi hates Trump, and she’s going to do everything she can to hurt him,” Florida Sen. Rick Scott told the Washington Examiner. “And you can’t trust them. I think Trump made a good decision.”
Scott, a Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, echoed Trump’s suggestion that Pelosi might have endangered U.S. forces by leaking information about the raid. Trump’s stance drew condemnation from Democratic lawmakers, as the death of the world’s most wanted terrorist provided another opportunity for a partisan dispute in Washington.
“I told my people we will not notify them until the — our great people are out,” Trump told reporters on Sunday. “Not just in, but out. I don’t want to have them greeted with firepower like you wouldn’t believe.”
Those comments drew a sharp rebuke from House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel, the New York lawmaker who is regarded as the Democratic leader whose foreign policy views are most aligned with Republicans on issues such as Iran.
“His implication that Speaker Pelosi, the elected representative third in line for the presidency, cannot be trusted with sensitive information is tremendously problematic and insulting, and further politicizes foreign policy — especially when Trump has shown himself to be an untrustworthy guardian of our national security and sensitive intelligence information,” Engel said in a statement.
The president’s team might have worried that Democratic officials would oppose the raid for political reasons, a former member of Trump’s White House National Security Council said.
“It is unusual, but I think there was very likely a concern that the Democrats in Congress would try to slow-roll or block this operation in order to prevent the president from claiming a victory,” the Atlantic Council’s Kirsten Fontenrose, who resigned from the administration last year amid the fallout from Trump’s support for Saudi Arabia, told reporters. “The White House may have thought they did not want to come up against that slow-roll and moved on without that [coordination].”
The controversy highlights the degree to which the political fighting between the two parties, and the more recent impeachment inquiry, has poisoned cooperation even on high priorities such as the death of the most dangerous terrorist leader since Osama bin Laden.
“Pelosi is out there and has a secret hearing and doesn’t want that to be known, but she wants to be told about stuff,” Scott said.
In that sense, Scott said, the dispute over the raid dramatizes a toxic absence of communication between Republicans and Democrats.
“It’s a pretty broken place,” Scott said. “I think there is so much hatred up here for Trump. They want to change the election in 2016 and make sure he doesn’t win in 2020. There’s no conversations about fixing things … I think that’s going to change at some point, but right now, there’s so much hatred for Trump.”
