Quoting Fox News host Chris Wallace, the liberal press hopes to score points against 73-year-old president Donald Trump for his Jan. 2 drone strike killing Al Quds chief 62-year-old Qassem Soleimani and 62-year-old Kataib Hezbollah Chief Abu Mahid Al-Muhandis. Democrats claim Trump lied about the reason behind the drone attack, saying Soleimani was planning to strike U.S. embassies around the Middle East. Wallace told Fox News daytime anchor Brett Baier that Trump and his 56-year-old Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hurt their credibility by saying a threat was “imminent” on U.S. embassies. Anti-Trump papers like the HuffPost lapped up Wallace’s every word, taking out of context Trump and Pompeo’s words. Wallace wanted to say that Pompeo should not have said there was an “imminent” threat to U.S. embassies when Kataib Hezbollah stormed the U.S. embassy in Baghadad Dec. 28.
Ordering the attack on Soleimani and al-Munhandis was directly related to the attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad inside the fortified Green Zone. Trump wasn’t about to allow Baghdad to turn into another Benghazi where al-Qaeda-linked terrorists attacked Sept. 11, 2012 the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, killing 52-year-old Amb. Christopher Steele and three other Americans. When you consider that an angry Iranian mob sacked the U.S. embassy in Tehran Feb. 14, 1979, taking 52 hostages, holding them for 444 days, Trump and Pompeo wanted no part of that. Yet Wallace criticizes Trump and Pompeo for saying an attack on U.S. embassies was “imminent.” Imminent doesn’t mean a date-certain for a specific attack but rather there’s reasonable belief that something bad will happen. Imminent events don’t necessarily lead to “inevitable” outcomes, even through there’s a greater risk.
Wallace implied to Baier that Trump and Pompeo lacked the justification for the predator drone attack against Soleimani and al-Muhandris. No one in the mainstream press wants to talk about the Baghdad embassy getting attacked. That alone was justification enough to go after Soleimani and al-Muhandris. Soleimani has been orchestrating terror operations in Yemen through Iranian Cmdr.Abdul Reza Shahiai. Pentagon officials failed to take out Shahiai on the same day they launched the successful strike on Soleimani and al-Muhandris. In case anyone doubted Iran’s direct involvement in Yemen, Shahiai ran Iran’s terror cell in Yemen, supplying Yemen’s Houthi rebels with ballistic missiles, drones and other war materiel. Yet the liberal press demands that Trump show proof that attacks on U.S. military and diplomatic property was “imminent” in the Mideast.
Wallace said if the White House “had been a little more forthcoming right from the start, they might have not allowed the skepticism to build,” Wallace told Baier on “Fox News Sunday.” Wallace didn’t say that that the White House had every right, regardless of how imminent, to go after Soleimani, al-Muhandis and Shahiai at a time of its choosing. Watching al-Munahdis’ Kataim Hezbollah mob try to batter down the door of the U.S. Baghdad embassy should tell Wallace what’s “imminent” about any threat coming from Iran to U.S. sovereign property. No one liked the U.S. embassy ransacked by Iranian revolutionaries in 1979, they certainly don’t want it in 2020. Wallace blamed Trump for his lack of trust of U.S. intelligence agencies, something bizarre since they were involved in wiretapping his campaign without legal cause, something currently under investigation.
Wallace told Baier that Trump was responsible for the skepticism over U.S. intelligence agencies. “And look, to a certain degree, I think the president has himself to blame, because who has been more critical and less sort of just trusting on face of intelligence agencies that Donald Trump over the last three years?” asked Wallace. Wallace doesn’t admit that Trump was the victim of an illegal counterintelligence investigation that was motivated by the Hillary campaign to sabotage his presidential bid. It was, after all, the late Sen. John McCain (R-Az.), one of Trump biggest Capitol Hill critics, that gave Hillary’s politically-motivated “dossier” of opposition campaign propaganda to former FBI Director James Comey. Comey used the dossier to dupe the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA] Court to obtain warrants to wiretap Trump campaign officials.
Left wing media loves to pounce on Fox News host like Wallace or former host Shepard Smith for negative comments about Trump. Fox News, that beats liberal networks like CNN and MSNBC, in the Nielsen ratings by big margins, prides itself on “fair-and-balanced” reporting, not hesitating to criticize conservatives at times. HuffPost had a field day Jan. 7, reporting on Sen. Mike Lee (R-Ut.) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), slamming Trump for his briefing on Soleimani’s death. Both Lee and Paul are anti-war libertarians, rippling Trump for ratcheting up Mideast tensions. When you consider the amount of mayhem sponsored by Soleimani and al-Muhandis, Trump had every right to hit a high-value target when it presented itself. Unable to get Reza Shahiai in Yemen, the White House has more work to do fighting terror. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei looks less threatening now than before.
