White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday that President Donald Trump made the decision to strike Iran because he “had a good feeling that the Iranian regime was going to strike” U.S. assets and personnel in the region.
The Trump administration has said that the U.S. faced imminent threats from Iran, which necessitated the strikes that began early Saturday. But it has not communicated specific intelligence or information beyond the fact that Iran possesses ballistic missile capabilities, as it has for years.
Reporters pressed Leavitt for specifics; she said the decision was informed by the president’s feelings.
“This decision to launch this operation was based on a cumulative effect of various direct threats that Iran posed to the United States of America, and the president’s feeling, based on fact, that Iran does pose an imminent, indirect threat to the United States of America,” she said.
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Trump’s feelings, Leavitt said, were “based on the fact that they are the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, based on the fact that they were rapidly and aggressively building up their ballistic missile program to give themselves immunity within their country, alongside their navy, so that inside their country they could continue to create nuclear weapons and nuclear bombs, which would of course pose a risk to Americans in the region and even Americans one day here at home.”
Earlier in the briefing, Leavitt said that a reported call from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with information about Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s whereabouts was also important to the timeline of the operation.
This is the second time the Trump administration has launched strikes on Iran in less than a year. Last June, the Department of Defense conducted a targeted strike on Iran’s Fordow Uranium Enrichment Plant, which Trump said at the time had “completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
But in his address, days before the war began, Trump suggested that Iran was rebuilding its nuclear weapons program, posing a threat.
“They’ve already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America. After ‘Midnight Hammer,’ they were warned to make no future attempts to rebuild their weapons program, in particular nuclear weapons,” Trump said on Feb. 24. “Yet they continue starting it all over. We wiped it out, and they want to start all over again, and are, at this moment again, pursuing their sinister ambitions.”
Iran has no structured program to manufacture nuclear weapons, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the Trump administration has so far failed to point to any evidence to the contrary. Though Iran possesses short- and medium-range missiles, Iran does not have long-range, intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach U.S. soil, according to the Department of Defense’s Defense Intelligence Agency.
Leaders on Capitol Hill, particularly Democrats, have demanded answers from the Trump administration about why the war has to happen.
“I have seen no evidence of an imminent threat from Iran against the United States or our interests,” Sen. Mark Warner, the vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a video posted to social media Monday.
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