Warren doubles down on linking Soleimani strike to impeachment, says Trump risked war for politics
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}DOVER, N.H. -- Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Friday charged that President Trump ordered last week’s U.S. drone attack in Iraq that killed Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani to save his “own political skin.”
Warren, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, argued that the president is “clearly a danger to the United States of America and to the entire world. We need to get him out of the White House.”
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The progressive firebrand from Massachusetts topped her town hall in this southern New Hampshire city by citing a report hours earlier from the Wall Street Journal. That story said that “Mr. Trump, after the strike, told associates he was under pressure to deal with Gen. Soleimani from GOP senators he views as important supporters in his coming impeachment trial in the Senate, associates said.”
In an interview with two New Hampshire newspapers and Fox News ahead of the town hall, Warren highlighted that she had suspicions of the timing of the attack soon after it occurred.
“When President Trump first announced that he had Soleimani killed, I thought, Why now? We’ve know about Soleimani for years. What’s the reason it’s not last month? What’s the reason it’s not next month? And does this have to do with the fact that we’re right here on the eve of impeachment,” Warren said.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}And pointing specifically to the report from the Wall Street Journal, Warren emphasized that the president “told his associates that he was under pressure to take Soleimani -- and these were important senators who were going to be important to him during the impeachment process. Once again this is Donald Trump using his power as president in order not to advance the interests of the United States, but instead to advance his own political interests.”
“This is like what [the president] did in Ukraine for which he’s being impeached. Only this one takes us right to the edge of war and that means the threat level is magnified many times over,” the senator stressed.
The president told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham in an exclusive interview on Friday that an imminent threat from Iran that provoked the United States to kill Soleimani involved planned attacks on four U.S. embassies. Asked specifically what was targeted, Trump revealed: “We will tell you that probably it was going to be the embassy in Baghdad.”
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Pressed on whether large-scale attacks were planned for other embassies, Trump said, “I can reveal that I believe it probably would’ve been four embassies.”
The full interview with the president will air Friday night at 10 p.m. ET on Fox News' “The Ingraham Angle.”
Some Democratic senators who attended a closed-door briefing on Wednesday with administration and military leaders said that no mention of an alleged Iranian threat to blow up U.S. embassies was discussed in the briefing.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Warren – who sat in on the briefing – told reporters after Friday’s town hall that “the briefing did not demonstrate that there was an imminent threat and both Republicans and Democrats have made that clear. That was one of the excuses that the Trump administration used. You remember though, when they first announced the killing of Soleimani, they pointed in several different directions. They couldn’t keep their story straight.”
WARREN TOWN HALL INTERRUPTED BY ANGRY PROTESTER
An irate protester interrupted the start of Warren’s town hall, angrily accusing the Massachusetts senator of “siding with terrorists” amid the conflict between the United States and Iran.