A critic of President Trump’s decision to bomb Syria says Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offered no new information during a classified Tuesday briefing for lawmakers.
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., said “I hate to say this,” but that “it felt to me that this briefing was perfunctory and that they were basically just engaged in rope-a-dope.”
Ahead of weekend airstrikes on three facilities in Syria, Massie said Trump lacked the legal authority to attack Syria’s government and offered no proof that Syrian President Bashar Assad killed about 40 people with an alleged April 7 chemical gas attack.
“As low information briefings go, this was one of the lowest information briefings I’ve ever received,” Massie said. “They provided no additional information other than whats been in the 24 hours news cycle. … They didn’t convey any information that wasn’t already on the Internet.”
Massie estimated that about 80 percent of members of the House of Representatives attended the meeting. Other attendees gave mixed reviews to the Washington Examiner. A briefing later in the afternoon was offered for senators.
“They didn’t even turn the screen on to show us anything pertinent to this,” Massie said. “They didn’t show us any evidence, and they had a screen where they could have projected video or shown us documents. They didn’t give us a scintilla of evidence.”
Massie said “they gave us their confidence levels that chlorine and sarin were used” in the formerly rebel-held town of Douma near Damascus, but he declined to say what the levels were.
The libertarian lawmaker sat near a microphone and was the first to ask a question. He asked if Trump could bomb Iran and North Korea without congressional authorization under the legal theory used to justify the Syria strike — that he possesses Article II powers under the Constitution as commander in chief to launch the attack.
“They basically didn’t answer. It was a non-answer, which is what you could expect. I would have been happy to get a, ‘Oh, we’ll come to Congress first’,” he said. “It seems to me you could justify just about anything using the legal framework they put together for this attack.”
Massie said about 15-20 other lawmakers asked questions, and said that he found it ironic that the top military leaders boasted of international approval.
“I did express my displeasure that they were proud to tell us they had received statements of support from Japan, the Gulf Cooperation Council, NATO, and the G-7, and yet they hadn’t sought a statement of support from Congress. I guess it didn’t seem ironic to them that we were the one body they probably should have asked first for a statement of support,” he said.
Massie said he believes Trump probably could have received congressional authorization for a limited strike on Syria, but that there’s reluctance among lawmakers to own the consequences.
“I’m not troubled that we leveled some buildings in Syria, and nobody died. I am troubled that the precedent has been set for striking a country in the absence of an AUMF or an immediate threat on our country,” Massie said. “But none of it matters unless 218 of my colleagues care.”
