Secretary of Defence Esper Contradicts Trump Claim Iran Planned Attacks on Four US Embassies – Videos

US Secretary of Defence Mark Esper appeared to mix up his own position on why the US made the decision to kill Gen. Qasem Soleimani, giving CNN and CBS two conflicting accounts on the matter.

“There was intelligence that there was an attempt to target the US Embassy in Baghdad. What the president said with regard to the four embassies is what I believe as well,” Esper said, speaking to CNN on Sunday morning.“He said that he believed that they probably, that they could have been targeting the embassies in the region,” Esper said. When asked to clarify what specific intelligence pushed the US president to make his decision, Esper responded that he was “not going to discuss intelligence matters here on this show.”

However, in a separate interview with CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday, Esper offered a different explanation, saying that “what the president said was he believed that there probably and could have been attacks against additional embassies. I shared that view, I know other members of the national security team shared that view. That’s why I deployed thousands of American paratroopers to the Middle East to reinforce our embassy in Baghdad and other sites throughout the region.”

When pressed by CBS’s Margaret Brennan, Esper admitted that “Well, the president didn’t say there was a tangible – he didn’t cite a specific piece of evidence. What he said is he probably – he believed could have been.” The Pentagon chief admitted to Brennan that he personally “didn’t see [a decisive piece of intelligence] with regard to four embassies.”