Sen. Chris Murphy comments on the latest news that Trump approved the option of assassinating Soleimani seven months ago:

Morning.

You cannot take military action against another nation without congressional consent unless to defend against an imminent attack.

It’s clear now this was an illegal action. That also has made America less safe. https://t.co/d8c54TFyy6

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) January 13, 2020

The president broke the law, and he and his officials have spent the last week and a half lying through their teeth about why he did it. The official line was that they took “defensive” action to prevent an “imminent” attack. That seemed fishy from the start, and that story fell apart very quickly. They have failed to provide any evidence to support their claim, and the reason they cannot back it up is that there was never anything to it. Now we can see that they intended to escalate against Iran as soon as they had an excuse to do so.

Ordering the assassination was such an extreme and dangerous action that the administration had to invent a story that was more palatable than “Iran hawks want to continue their vendetta,” so it seems that they cooked up the “imminent” attack fiction that the intelligence reportedly never supported. They needed to make Congress and the public believe that they acted defensively, because the alternative was admitting that they launched an illegal attack against another state because they wanted to. Perhaps they were banking on deference to the executive and the usual media credulity about foreign threats to protect them from exposure, but that didn’t work this time.

By all rights, Congress should add another article of impeachment against the president for this. When the president abuses his position to order military action without Congressional authorization, that is one of the most serious breaches of his oath of office that he can commit. This not only exceeds the authority that the Constitution gives him, but it potentially drags the country into a war without the knowledge or consent of Congress and the public. There is no question that the president made a reckless decision to launch an attack that he had no authority to order on his own. He and other administration officials have been trying to deceive everyone about the reason for that decision. Congress should investigate thoroughly and expose this illegal scheme so that the public knows the real story.

Let this be a reminder that we should always view official justifications for military action with distrust and skepticism. More often than not, the official reasons that we are given will turn out to be false. The only surprising thing about the latest deception is how quickly and easily it was exposed.