As House Democrats walked out of a closed-door briefing on Tuesday evening over the United States’s military campaign against Iran, many expressed exasperation with the Trump administration and said the president and his team had not offered a sufficient justification for the attack on foreign soil.
“I just want to say I am more fearful than ever after this briefing that we may be putting boots on the ground and that troops from the United States may be necessary to accomplish objectives that the administration seems to have,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) after leaving the meeting held by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Joint Chiefs chair Dan Caine.
Blumenthal added, “I think the administration owes it to the American people to have briefings not just for members of Congress, but for the American public.”
In a social media video posted by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the senator directly addressed those watching and said, “It is so much worse than you thought.” Warren added, “You are right to be worried. The Trump administration has no plan in Iran. This illegal war is based on lies, and it was launched without any imminent threat to our nation. Donald Trump still hasn’t given a single clear reason for this war, and he seems to have no plan for how to end it either.”
The United States and Israel launched a war against Iran on Saturday in what Donald Trump has described as “massive and ongoing.” Iran’s longtime supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed by U.S. and Israeli strikes, as were several top figures in Khamenei’s regime. Multiple U.S. service members have also died.
Trump has since offered a series of contradictory statements to the media about his administration’s plan moving forward. The president and the administration said they needed to counteract the threat Iran posed to the United States, even though Iran does not possess a nuclear weapon and the administration acknowledged it had no intelligence suggesting Iran planned to attack U.S. forces. During a Pentagon press conference, Hegseth said that the U.S. does not currently have troops in Iran, but didn’t rule out the possibility of boots on the ground. Hegseth also claimed that “this is not a regime change war,” despite the targeted attacks on the regime’s high command, and later added: “The regime did change.”
On Tuesday, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn) shared his reaction with reporters following the briefing, and said, “I’m more convinced now that this is going to be open ended and forever.”
“This feels like a multi-trillion-dollar open-ended conflict with a very confusing and constantly shifting set of goals,” said Murphy. “They clearly seem fine with hard-line elements being in control of the country, because they plan to permanently run air operations in order to chase [Iran’s] missile-making capability, drone-making capability and nuclear capabilities.”
