government and he has a responsibility to congress to make sure that we have this information that our leaders have this information and that we re all making these decisions together, or being informed of the decisions as they re being made. and to your point, after he announced the successful raid, his campaign sent out this text. it says this. president trump has brought the number one terrorist leader to justice. is he keeping america safe. rate his job performance. take our poll in the next hour. you talk about politicizing national defense and politicizing the military. this takes it to a different degree, it appears. it really does. and, look, we just have to say that, first of all, we are grateful to the troops. we are grateful to the intelligence agencies and to the kurds who took a very dangerous person off the streets. al baghdadi is somebody who literally caused the deaths of thousands of people and the displacement of so many more. but let s be clear that the
out of the loop of the operation to kill baghdadi, where the top lead were the top leaders of the u.s. congress. the white house isn t required to brief them but someone generally does, like when leon panetta kept them in the loop to the raid of osama bin laden. they wanted to keep this as close as possibly could, knowing operational security would jeopardize and could accelerate his packing up and leaving. when were you told about the mission again? i ve been talking to mr. panetta over these four months and over this weekend. we knew when the president authorized it and we had some discussions that it was likely to happen and then got a call after it happened. the gang of eight was left out and president trump framed his reasons as dire. take a look at this. have you notified the congressional leaders about this, pelosi?
oil. one, is that appropriate, given that syria is a sovereign nation? two, is it realistic? the oil that exists there, there s not much of it and it s fairly low quality. give us a reality check of that happening. i think what happened here is president trump said basically get out of syria. you had a very rapid unraveling. and our forces are trying to decree act to a cascading set of circumstances, abandoning bases, russians taking them over. the president was convinced to leave some forces in syria, which is probably a good thing. the problem is, and you re exactly right, these regions are kind of in the middle of nowhere in the southeast corner of the whole third of syria we used to have influence over. we ve already given up the main kurdish areas in the north of the zone. to say we re going to protect the oil and support the kurds with revenue doesn t really make much sense. and the presence itself you
the fact that you were among the congressional leaders who were not informed in advance about this al baghdadi operation. how do you respond to that, react to that? first of all, let me thank the men and women who did participate in this successful effort. you know, our president continues to try to divide us. in the past we joined as a nation to fight a common enemy. i wish the president would understand that and quit trying to divide us. it s unfortunate. the fact that the speaker of the united states house of representatives and a lot of other of us had to see this play out on tv. this is really not how it should be done. and what s your overall reaction to your news of the
welcome back to kasie d.c.. the parallels are striking, terrorist leader killed by u.s. forces in a daring weekend nighttime raid. no doubt that abu bakr al baghdadi and osama bin laden s deaths were important for american military and intelligence. there s little doubt that the white house is trying to frame this weekend s raid in northern syria as the president s bin laden moment. certainly on president trump s mind this morning when taking questions from the media. but this is the biggest there is. this is the worst ever. osama bin laden was very big, but osama bin laden became big with the world trade center. this is a man who built a whole, as he would like to call it, country, a caliphate zp. the imagery was also similar, with president trump surrounded by generals.