The first thing lawmakers did when President Donald Trump struck Iran was demand an intelligence briefing. After sitting in the same secure room in the Capitol, lawmakers from each party walked out with very different takeaways.
“Nothing I heard in there gives me a sense that there was any credible imminent threat, certainly not in the way that I understand it as someone who’s worked in national security, that would justify a war of this magnitude,” Sen. Andy Kim, a Democrat, told reporters on his way out of an all-senators briefing last week.
His Republican colleagues said the exact opposite of the same meeting. Sen. Cynthia Lummis told NOTUS that Iran’s nuclear and missile program was “an imminent threat” and, when asked if she was satisfied with the information, said she was.
“In fact, the more I’ve learned, the more convinced I am that this was absolutely the right thing to do,” Lummis said.
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That initial briefing has become a case study for how polarizing intelligence has become in Congress. Historically, both parties have generally agreed on the trustworthiness of intelligence.
Republicans and Democrats — hawks and doves, alike — on the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 excoriated the intelligence, which was proven false, used to justify going to war in Iraq.
Ian Bryan, a former Senate and Defense Department aide who worked on intelligence and defense issues during Barack Obama’s, Trump’s and Joe Biden’s presidencies, said he remembers when there was bipartisan agreement over the basic facts of a military campaign, including the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
“There were certainly differing interpretations of the wisdom of what was going on and the administration’s policy, but I don’t recall a lot of contention about the facts at hand,” Bryan said of the Afghanistan briefings.
Over the years, lawmakers have increasingly accused each other of politicizing intelligence, making facts and data about national security less straightforward than ever. As the U.S. operation in Iran continues, partisan sparring over intelligence could affect Congress’ ability to perform oversight.
“Bipartisan? Up here? There’s no bipartisan up here,” Republican Sen. Rick Scott told NOTUS when asked about a bipartisan consensus on Iran intelligence. “There’s none. Like, name something bipartisan up here.”
Republicans’ decision in 2018 to end the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian election interference and publish its report without input from Democrats marked a break from the norm of joint findings and foreshadowed years of partisan knife fights on intelligence matters where Donald Trump is involved. The Senate version of that report, which determined that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, had more bipartisan support.
That history means members of Congress now expect fact-finding missions pertaining to the Iran war to be clouded in partisan acrimony.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Dan Caine briefed most senators and House members in back-to-back sessions last week, but brought with them the assumption that the conclusions lawmakers drew would effectively be set by their party affiliation.
In a press gaggle ahead of one such briefing, a reporter made six words into a question — “Several Democrats criticized what you said…” — before being cut off by Rubio.
“They’re going to always criticize. We’ve been doing this for years, guys,” Rubio said. “They’re going to come out after the briefing and say, ‘We didn’t hear anything, we have more questions than answers’ — you mark my words. But we still do these briefings.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, also said he continued to have “doubts” after the briefing.
“We were provided with a measure of information, but my doubts are still very serious about whether this was an imminent threat and what the objectives are and how the administration plans to achieve them,” Blumenthal said.
Rubio and Trump have offered several different explanations over 12 days for the decision to strike Iran. Hegseth originally said the actions in Iran were “not a regime-change war.” Rubio told lawmakers that the move to strike came from intelligence that Israel was going to do so and that Iran would retaliate against American forces in response. Meanwhile, the White House has maintained that Trump “had a good feeling” that Iran was going to strike the U.S. first.
All the while, administration officials reportedly told congressional staff that there was no intelligence of an imminent threat.
Trump has since doubled back, again pointing to regime change as the impetus for war.
In Iran, that dissonance from the administration on the conflict’s origins further riled Democrats, many of whom said they didn’t have faith in the administration’s motive for war.
“I don’t think there’s consensus among administration officials on why they went into Iran,” Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA analyst, said on March 4. “When they get their story straight, I look forward to getting a briefing that actually follows one train of thought instead of just being scattered and chaotic all over the place.”
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