Sen. Christopher Coons (D-Del.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on Sunday decried what he called a lack of meaningful information presented to members of Congress about the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, saying President Trump provided more detail in an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham.
“In the classified briefing, we got less detailed information than President Trump shared with Laura Ingraham,” Coons said on “Fox News Sunday,” adding that administration representatives told members of Congress there was an “imminent threat” and “no more detail than that.”
Trump told Ingraham that Soleimani had been plotting attacks on four U.S. embassies, including one in Iraq, without offering further evidence. “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace had pressed White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien on the inconsistency between the briefing and the interview in a previous segment.
Although Coons hastened to say the killing “certainly took out one of our worst enemies in the Middle East,” he added that “the larger question is, does it makes us safer, did it make our position in the region more stable and is there a clear strategy for moving forward?”
Coons also said that while the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” tactics against Iran had borne some fruit, its foreign policy had led to “a real weakening of our alliances.”
“What made the [2015] Iran deal possible was getting most of the world aligned with the United States in putting sanctions and pressure on Iran,” Coons said. “This recent incident of killing Qassem Soleimani has further strained some of our partnerships” with nations such as the U.K., France and Germany, “and we need them if we’re going to build a stronger next Iran deal.”