Mike Lee on Iran Skepticism: We Were Lied to About Both Iraq and Afghanistan

By now, you’ve probably heard that Senator Mike Lee emerged from last week’s Iran intel briefing pissed off at a lack of answers legislators got. This morning on CNN he reiterated “we didn’t receive very much information that wasn’t already available through public media sources.”

He told Jake Tapper, “This is one of the things that’s very frustrating. When something like this happens, when events are unfolding quickly, events that will have a profound impact on national security and military strategy, Congress does need to know about it, in part so we can evaluate the scope of our authority to act or choose not to act. We didn’t get that. And that was disappointing. ”

Tapper asked if he heard anything in the briefing with respect to threats on four U.S. embassies, something the president brought up on Friday.

“I didn’t hear anything about that. And several of my colleagues have said the same,” Lee said. “So that was news to me. It certainly wasn’t something that I recall being raised in the classified briefing.”

He said that taking out Qasem Soleimani was a good thing, but added, “It does matter that we give the details to members of Congress, and it does matter to figure out where we go from here and to make sure that any further action is authorized by Congress.”

At one point, Tapper asked, “How worried are you about the integrity of the information we’re being told?”

Lee said he is concerned about that:

“As a United States senator and as a voter and citizen, I have learned not to simply take the federal government’s word at face value. I mean, look, we were lied to about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We were lied to for a couple of decades about what was happening in Afghanistan. We have been lied to about a lot of things. It’s not to say that the government is always lying or that the people who run it are inherently evil. It’s just that they’re human. And these things do happen.”

You can watch above, via CNN.