Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Sean Casten: Pleasure to be here, Greg.
Casten: Candidly, my immediate thought is that once again, we have to pretend that Trump is someone who might be telling the truth or is not just a small, venal man. If he wasn’t the president of United States, we would be ignoring all this. Because he is, we have to talk about it. If you just take the substance of the claim, the initial claim was that we dropped a bomb, bomb went boom, it was a very successful mission. That on its face, I think just purely as a matter of military strategy, you couldn’t possibly know at the time you dropped the bomb. You need to go in there. Suppose if we had a group of international inspectors who could access the facility and inspect things that was negotiated with a multinational coalition, that would be a way you might know that sort of stuff.
Sargent: Congressman, the other reason this Trump eruption seems so questionable is that there do appear to be serious questions about what’s happened to Iran’s enriched uranium. NBC reported that the whereabouts of 880 pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent is currently unknown. So I strongly suspect that one reason Trump is raging at the media is because media figures are pointing out that. And this is seriously problematic for him. Can you talk about the status of that and how important is it?
Sargent: Yeah.
Sargent: Well, just to underscore what you said there, the point you raised, I think, is that Trump’s own tweets seem to have tipped off Iran in certain ways—in certain ways that forced the defense establishment to compensate to deal with the problem that Trump himself had created. And so your point is well-taken that Trump has underscored his own vulnerability here. If it turns out that the enriched uranium was moved in part due to Trump himself—his own tweets—then it would seem to be an extreme point of vulnerability for him, no?
Sargent: Right. Well, let’s talk about House Speaker Mike Johnson for a sec. He said that the strikes were justified. Senator Chris Murphy then said on Twitter that he got briefed on the same intelligence that the speaker did and said there was no imminent threat. Congressman, what is the current state of knowledge among members of Congress right now about what the intelligence has been showing up to now and what it’s showing right at this moment? What sort of briefings have members gotten? What are you able to discuss? I understand that’s a big one tomorrow. What do you know right now? What do members know?
And in somewhat more granular detail, we’ve been talking for a long time about how long is it before Iran has the ability to go nuclear? Is it days, is it weeks, is it months? And that’s been a function both of the volume of enriched material at Fordo, which I think our best intelligence is there was probably enough material there to potentially make something in the order of 10 warheads; then whether that enriched material was in a position to be mounted on a warhead, which I’ve not heard anything to suggest it was yet; and then whether that warhead could be put onto a delivery system that could have reached Israel, much less into the U.S. I don’t think there’s any evidence that Iran has any kind of a delivery system that could reach the homeland. So this is a short horizon threat to Israel, a beyond-the-realm-of-planning threat to the U.S., at least on the homeland. So given that level of intelligence, it is hard to believe that there was suddenly a change in information that ran contrary to what we were hearing from intelligence officials, who.… I forget the exact words of what Trump said, but he basically said his intelligence people are not that intelligent or something like that. So we’re—
Casten: Yeah. OK. So we’re left to believe not only that the intelligence we received was wrong, but that the intelligence the president received didn’t matter.
Casten: Yeah. Look, I wish Rubio and Vance would treat Donald Trump like the president of the U.S. and not the Supreme Leader of the U.S. This is the same descent into autocracy. Those people should be better than that. I do just want to highlight, because I think one of the big concerns on the intelligence here is if you.… Let’s humor the thought that there was intelligence out there that Congress had not been briefed on because it was too dangerous or could be too many leaks. Let’s at least stipulate that that’s true. If that was the case, then this plan should have been prepared or at least on hot standby and not just triggered because Israel had just attacked Natanz and all of a sudden everybody was talking about the fact that Israel, who clearly wanted to take out Iran’s nuclear capacity, didn’t have the weapons systems to go into Fordo and only the United States did.
Sargent: And you’ll be able, presumably, or members of Congress will be able, presumably, to press intel officials and top Trump administration officials to show that to be the case. I just want to go to your point about the ease with which Trump is manipulated. Fox News played a big role in this. We have now seen twice reported in The New York Times, in some sense or other, that the relentless drumbeat for war, the portrayal of the initial Israeli strikes as “genius,” as “brilliant”—all that really worked on Trump. The reporting indicates that he got it into his head that he wanted some credit for what was going on. So he then went out and he said “we,” meaning the U.S. and Israel—all of a sudden “we”—and talked about it in those terms. How do you react to the fact that Fox News figures understood that they can manipulate the president by doing this?
Sargent: Pete Hegseth. It’s clear.
Sargent: Well, yeah. It’s pretty extraordinary that it worked so brilliantly, as Trump might put it, right?
Sargent: Well, having somebody who’s this obviously unfit for the job, meaning the president, and also one who appoints fourth-rate talent off of Fox News because he likes the way a tattoo looked or whatever it is, that seems to me to be tailor-made for Congress getting involved. That makes the case very clearly for why you want Congress involved in authorizing the use of military force. It’s kind of important, and it’s important to have a lot of minds thinking about it and the people’s representatives thinking about it as well. That’s my long way of getting to your strong case that Trump has committed impeachable offenses. You’ve argued that it’s not acceptable for Congress to have no role here. Can you talk about that case?
To now be in a situation where we’re saying.… None of us had any intel to believe there was an imminent threat to the U.S. In the statement Trump made on the night of the bombings, I don’t think he even used the words “imminent threat to the U.S.” He said this was for his friend Netanyahu and for God. Whatever it was, it wasn’t consistent with looking out for the interests of the American people. One can imagine what he thought would be in his short-term political interests. While I don’t think they had a role, I don’t think we should dismiss the fact that the Saudis are no friend of the Iranians either. And a weakened Iran is good for Saudi Arabia, who, by the way, has a ton of financial encumbrances with the Trump and Kushner families at this point. And so this question of, Didn’t the president act with the best interests of the U.S. in mind, consistent with the spirit of the War of Powers Act? is an extremely legitimate question at this moment—particularly for a president who campaigned on not getting into foreign entanglements, who had a whole lot of people, including his own party, saying getting tied up in an 18-year war in Iraq on botched intelligence was a mistake.
Sargent: Well, the point about accountability is key because that’s precisely why Congress has shifted authority over to the president for war making over the decades, which has been a long, slow process—well, you know this. It’s basically about shrugging off accountability for these types of situations, which brings me to Senator John Fetterman, who went on Fox News and sharply attacked the calls for Trump’s impeachment. Fetterman said this, “I think if you throw that term around, that actually diminishes the severity of what impeachment is really reserved for.” Congressman, your response to that?
For those of us who are in positions of leadership, who have the ability to shape the public mood, I think it is our job to say, given the stakes of what’s here, Should we elevate this and make sure that people understand it or not? Because if we’re not willing to elevate it, we’re either denying that it’s a problem to destabilize a region on false intel, or we’re saying we’re incapable of leadership and can’t move public opinion. And I would ask Senator Fetterman, which of those two things is the case here?
Make that case to the public, because I don’t think you can make it.
Casten: Yeah. Let me try to make the argument on Trump’s side, but I don’t think it applies to Fetterman’s argument. There are any number of cases we can point to in history with CIA black ops that didn’t get congressional consent or attacks on nonstate terrorist actors—whether the Houthis, MS-13—where those didn’t get congressional consent. I am hard pressed to think of a scenario where a president attacked another nation state, said it was for regime change specifically—even if he didn’t say it was for regime change, [he] did something that was innate to that nation’s core identity—and did that without seeking congressional consent beforehand.
Sargent: Congressman Sean Casten, well said. Thanks so much for coming on with us today. We really appreciate it.
Casten: Thank you, Greg. Pleasure to talk to you.
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