Sen. Jeff Merkley claimed that the information the intelligence community gave lawmakers about the decision to kill Qassem Soleimani could be “corrupted.”
President Trump ordered the drone strike to kill the Iranian general due to an “imminent threat” against American lives. Many Democrats have doubted the administration because the evidence of the pending attack has been conflicted by reports that Trump had cleared killing Soleimani several months before the general died.
During an interview on New Day, Merkley, 63, called the Trump administration’s claim that an attack was imminent an “after-the-fact argument.” He added, “When you have no identifiable target or actor or time schedule or place, you don’t have an imminent threat. When you don’t have a decision, you don’t have an imminent threat.”
He continued, “It was an effort to place it into a stronger construction of international law. The administration has stumbled all over itself. It reminds me of how intelligence was corrupted during the war against Saddam Hussein. We have to be very careful. I’m very concerned our intelligence community in this case with Gina Haspel at the top is bending their presentations rather than giving us a full, straight-out accountability of the facts.”
Haspel replaced Mike Pompeo as director of the CIA after he transitioned to become secretary of state. Her nomination was controversial because she operated a “black site” in Thailand where some suspected terrorists faced enhanced interrogation, such as waterboarding.
Merkley claimed that Haspel “didn’t have any facts” when she explained the Soleimani raid, adding, “The intelligence community needs to be very straight in a classified presentation: This is the type of information we got. This is where we got it. This is who was involved. This is our level of confidence in it. That’s the type we’re accustomed to seeing. We saw nothing like that from Gina Haspel.”
The Oregon Democrat sits on the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee. He worked in the office of the secretary of defense before returning to Oregon to serve in the state legislature until he was elected to the U.S. Senate.
[Read more: A question of imminence: Trump and team double down on why US needed to kill Soleimani]
