Trump’s team insists Soleimani was an “imminent” threat. Just don’t ask for details.

“They really need to get their story straight,” an expert said.

The Trump administration’s stated rationale for killing Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani — that he posed an “imminent threat” to Americans requiring the US to take him out — is looking more and more bogus.

From political rallies to press conferences to secret briefings to official documents, Trump administration officials have repeatedly failed to provide evidence that Soleimani posed more danger to Americans at the time he was killed than he routinely did for decades. Trump’s team has so bungled its justification for the strike that even some Republicans have criticized the administration.

Without evidence establishing the “imminent threat” rationale, which could help bolster a self-defense case, experts say the government would struggle to legally justify greenlighting the operation in court.

And despite having now had over a week to provide that evidence to the public, officials from President Donald Trump on down have increasingly begun to talk about the operation as retribution for the killing of an American contractor in Iraq by members of an Iranian-backed militia and the storming of the US embassy in Baghdad in late December.

This failure has turned what could’ve been a positive moment in Trump’s presidency — the removal of a deadly anti-American general during a standoff with Iran that may have deterred further lethal action — into an embarrassing botch.

“I’m surprised at how poorly they are making any credible public case for it,” says Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution. “I’m not sure if that’s arrogance or incompetence or some combination of both.”

The origins of the Trump administration’s “imminent threat” argument

After a US drone bombed a two-car convoy carrying Soleimani outside Baghdad’s airport on January 2, the Pentagon put out a statement that would serve as the backbone of the administration’s case for killing the military leader.

“General Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” the statement read. “This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans.”

That statement offers two justifications for the strike, then: 1) Soleimani had been planning to kill Americans and thus needed to be killed immediately to prevent that from happening; and 2) killing Soleimani would deter Iran from making future plans to attack Americans.

The next day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told CNN that “there was, in fact, an imminent attack taking place. … The American people should know that this was an intelligence-based assessment that drove this,” he added.

Put together, the Pentagon and Pompeo statements made it clear the administration was choosing to justify the legality of the strike by claiming it was in self-defense (rather than, say, arguing it was legal under the 2001 Congressional authorization to use force against the 9/11 attackers, or under the 2002 Congressional authorization for the Iraq War).

All Trump’s team needed to do was provide evidence that killing the Iranian general was truly an act of self-defense — as Article 51 of the UN Charter allows for in international law — and that killing him was the only way to prevent an imminent attack, and they’d be in the clear.

Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images

And that’s where everything seems to have started falling apart. The administration has yet to provide the public with any evidence that Soleimani was planning an imminent attack beyond vague and often conflicting statements about plots to blow up one or more embassies.

“Their justification has been completely crumbling,” Oona Hathaway, an international law expert at Yale Law School and former Pentagon lawyer, told me. “Each time they’ve been pressed to give facts for their ‘imminent’ case, they just can’t do it.”

While some Republican members of Congress have said the administration provided sufficient evidence of an imminent attack in a classified briefing with the House and Senate on Wednesday, other GOP members — along with most Democrats — had a different view: “This was probably the worst briefing I’ve seen, at least on a military issue, in the nine years I’ve served in the US Senate,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) told reporters after the Senate session.

Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who attended the briefing, told Vox’s Worldly podcast on Thursday the officials “just didn’t have” the requisite evidence of an imminent threat, adding, “This was a lot of bluster.”

From “imminent” to “days” to “you never know”

On Monday, Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Pentagon reporters that the Soleimani intelligence the US got wasn’t overly specific. “Did it exactly say who, what, when, where? No,” he said. “But he was planning, coordinating, and synchronizing significant combat operations against US military forces in the region and it was imminent.”

On Tuesday, after having said just a few days before that the administration had made “an intelligence-based assessment” that there was “an imminent attack taking place,” Pompeo was asked by a reporter to provide more details about that imminent threat.

His response was to say that Soleimani deserved his fate for having American blood on his hands.

“We know what happened at the end of last year, in December, ultimately leading to the death of an American,” Pompeo said. “So, if you are looking for imminence, look no further than the days that led up to the strike that was taken against Soleimani.”

That same day, Defense Secretary Mark Esper was asked by a Pentagon reporter if the intelligence America had showed Soleimani’s attack would take place in days or weeks. “I think it’s more fair to say days, for sure,” the defense chief responded.

Esper also insisted the intelligence gathered by the US was “exquisite,” but whether it was worthy of the superlative remains an open question as he didn’t actually share any of it with the press.

National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien — who was one of the administration officials who briefed Congress this week — offered a few more details in an interview with NPR. He said the intelligence showed an attack was “imminent” in Iraq and perhaps Syria, but that “you never know the time and place of these things with perfect particularity.”

Pompeo gave a similar statement to Fox News’s Laura Ingraham on Thursday night. “There were a series of imminent attacks that were being plotted by Qassem Soleimani,” he said. “We don’t know precisely when, and we don’t know precisely where, but it was real.”

On Wednesday, Kelly Craft, the US ambassador to the UN, quietly sent a letter to the president of the UN Security Council. It’s what’s known as an “Article 51 letter,” and as Hathaway, the Yale international law expert, explained on Twitter, it’s a document that a country “is required to file if it is claiming to have acted in self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.”

It stated, in part:

[T]he United States has undertaken certain actions in the exercise of its inherent right of self-defense. These actions were in response to an escalating series of armed attacks in recent months by the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iran-supported militias on U.S. forces and interests in the Middle East region, in order to deter the Islamic Republic of Iran from conducting or supporting further attacks against the United States or U.S. interests, and to degrade the Islamic Republic of Iran and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force supported militias’ ability to conduct attacks. These actions include an operation on January 2, 2020, against leadership elements of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force on the territory of Iraq.

The January 2 operation referred to here is the Soleimani killing.

The letter goes on to list several of those “armed attacks in recent months” by Iran and its proxies. They include an Iranian drone flying near a US warship in July, Iran’s shoot-down of a US drone in June, and the killing of a US contractor in Iraq by an Iranian-backed proxy group in December.

What the letter doesn’t list, however, is any evidence of an imminent attack being planned by Soleimani. Even some UN officials I spoke to were surprised Craft had sent that letter.

“The administration just pointed to general animosities between the US and Iran,” Hathaway says. “That animosity has been true for decades. So why kill Soleimani now?” The administration, she says, hasn’t come close to making a persuasive argument.

“It just doesn’t hold up. The law can’t make up for missing facts. They actually needed to have a factual predicate to allow them to take the action that they did.”

The administration’s stumbling, bumbling, fumbling imminence claims have left Iran experts like Maloney completely stunned. “They really need to get their story straight,” she told me. “The cover-up is always likely to get you into more trouble than the original crime.”