The claim in Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book that President Trump ordered the assassination of Syrian President Bashar Assad has the “whiff of truth,” Rep. Adam Smith said on Wednesday.
“Whether you take Bob Woodward’s book at face value or not, it’s got the whiff of truth, let’s just put it that way,” said Smith, who is the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. “When you think about several things that the president has tweeted out on other subjects that we’ve all seen, it’s not hard to imagine him waking up one day and saying, ‘Why can’t we just kill Assad? Let’s go kill him.’ ”
Smith was asked about the book while speaking before an audience gathered in Pentagon City for the Defense News Conference.
“There isn’t a person sitting in this room who hasn’t heard those rumors. I don’t know anything more about those rumors than you do,” he said.
Woodward reports that Trump called Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in April 2017 and demanded the U.S. strike at Assad following a chemical weapons attack.
“Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them,” Trump reportedly said. Mattis got off the phone call and told an aide, “We’re not going to do any of that. We’re going to be much more measured,” according to Woodward.
Both Mattis and Trump said the account is not true.
“The contemptuous words about the president attributed to me in Woodward’s book were never uttered by me or in my presence. While I generally enjoy reading fiction, this is a uniquely Washington brand of literature, and his anonymous sources do not lend credibility,” Mattis said in a statement, which was tweeted out by Trump.
