'Lying' Trump caught up in horror gaffe as details emerge over Iran's devastating attacks

Trump and his administration have repeatedly insisted that the killing of Iran’s top military commander, Qasem Soleimani, was carried out to prevent those attacks from taking place. The US President first made the claim on Thursday and then again that same evening at a rally in Ohio. Trump told his audience that Soleimani “was actively planning new attacks”.

In an interview with FOX News presenter Laura Ingraham that aired on Friday, he said: “I can reveal that I believe it probably would’ve been four embassies.”

However, two sources have confirmed to CNN that State Department officials responsible for US embassy security were kept in the dark about any looming attacks contrary to normal procedure.

Furthermore, the officials said that the State Department failed to produce any analysis that US embassies in the Middle East faced an imminent threat, the legally required threshold to justify Soleimani’s killing.

Although security at US embassies in the region has been beefed up in recent months, the measures were not taken immediately ahead of the Soleimani strike.

They were also not the extra steps that are normally taken in an “imminent threat” situation, according to former State Department employees.

Oversea diplomats received no explicit warnings, nor were any follow-up orders issued to limit diplomats’ movements and prepare for possible staff evacuations.

To compound suspicions, Trump administration officials have offered confusing and sometimes contradictory explanations as to the imminence of the threats posed by the Quds Force commander.

On Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the general’s assassination was part of a larger strategy of deterrence.

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Yet previously, he had claimed that the strike was to prevent an “imminent” attack.

During a speech at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, the Secretary of State said: “Judging from the type and intensity of the strike, the regime certainly must now understand what we will do if they ever again pose risk to American lives.

“If Iran escalates, we will end it on our terms.”

Secretary of Defence, Mark Esper, also told CNN on Sunday that there was a threat against the US embassy in Baghdad, but refused to divulge any further details.

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But then Esper explicitly told CBS that he had not seen any intelligence to back up Trump’s claims of four US embassies being under threat of an imminent attack.

When asked if there was a specific piece of evidence, he replied: “I didn’t see one with regard to four embassies.”

Democrats, who were invited to an intelligence briefing on the fatal strike, said that they had been presented with no evidence of embassy plots.

House Armed Services committee chairman Adam Smith, a Democrat, said there was “no evidence” of a future Iranian bombing attack on a US embassy presented during a classified White House briefing given to lawmakers on Wednesday last week.

“Nobody that I’ve talked to in any setting, and I’ve talked to quite a few people in the White House, has said that,” he told Politico.

“It has been communicated to me that there weren’t specific targets, that the intel that we had did not cite specific targets, just more of a broad thing,” he said.

“So if the president had evidence of the specific target, that has not been communicated to us.”

Bernie Saunders, a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, said that Trump was a “pathological liar” who could not be trusted.

He told NBC news: “So could it be true? I guess it could be. Is it likely to be true? Probably not.”