Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday that Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani was planning a “a broad, large-scale attack” against American facilities, including U.S. embassies, in the Middle East, but he didn’t provide specific information about the plot. Pompeo made the new comments during a White House press briefing after telling Fox News on Thursday the government didn’t know when or where the attack would take place.
“We don’t know exactly which day it would have been executed, but it was very clear: Qassem Soleimani himself was plotting a broad, large-scale attack against American interests, and those attacks were imminent,” Pompeo told CBS News White House correspondent Paula Reid. President Trump addressed the drone strike on Iran’s top general during a rally with supporters in Toledo, Ohio, on Thursday night.
“Soleimani was actively planning new attacks, and he was looking very seriously at our embassies and not just the embassy in Baghdad, but we stopped him, and we stopped him quickly, and we stopped him cold,” the president said without offering any evidence to support his claim. Sources told CBS News that members of Congress were not told during a briefing by administration officials earlier this week about any imminent threats to U.S. embassies, CBS News chief congressional correspondent Nancy Cordes reports.
