Speaking to reporters on Thursday afternoon, President Donald Trump asserted that top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani was plotting to blow up an American embassy when he was killed by a U.S. airstrike last week. Later in the evening at a campaign rally in Toledo, Ohio, the president took that claim even further.
“Soleimani was actively planning new attacks and he was looking very seriously at our embassies and not just the embassy in Baghdad,” the president told his supporters, “but we stopped him and we stopped him quickly, and we stopped him cold.”
Multiple lawmakers, however, have said that they saw no intelligence in briefings this week that backed up the rationale by the Trump administration that they needed to kill the Iranian military commander to stop an “imminent threat.”
