The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 24 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Donald Trump is very unhappy with the way the media is covering his strikes on Iran. On Truth Social, he exploded in fury at specific reporters for daring to suggest that the strikes might not have destroyed Iran’s nuclear program completely. We think this exposes potentially serious political vulnerability for Trump. Questions are mounting about the lack of intelligence indicating that Iran’s nuclear program posed an imminent threat, and some reports have raised serious questions about his initial declaration of success in destroying the program completely. Trump thought he could scam his way through this by declaring absolute undiluted triumph with the bombing mission, and then counting on Republicans in Congress to help him prevent any hard questions from being asked. His anger at independent truth-seeking on the matter, however, calls this into serious questions. Today we’re discussing this with Congressman Sean Casten, Democrat of Illinois, who has been making a strong case that Trump has committed impeachable offenses by bombing Iran without congressional authorization. Congressman Casten, thanks so much for joining us.
Sean Casten: Pleasure to be here, Greg.
Sargent: Let’s start with Trump’s bizarre angry eruption on Truth Social. He said the following, “The sites that we hit in Iran were totally destroyed, and everyone knows it. Only the Fake News would say anything different in order to try and demean, as much as possible.” And then Trump smeared Anderson Cooper as “Allison Cooper,” an apparent anti-gay slur, and attacked ABC’s John Karl and NBC News and a couple others. He called them all “sleazebags.” What’s your immediate thought on this, Congressman?
Casten: Candidly, my immediate thought is that once again, we have to pretend that Trump is someone who might be telling the truth or is not just a small, venal man. If he wasn’t the president of United States, we would be ignoring all this. Because he is, we have to talk about it. If you just take the substance of the claim, the initial claim was that we dropped a bomb, bomb went boom, it was a very successful mission. That on its face, I think just purely as a matter of military strategy, you couldn’t possibly know at the time you dropped the bomb. You need to go in there. Suppose if we had a group of international inspectors who could access the facility and inspect things that was negotiated with a multinational coalition, that would be a way you might know that sort of stuff.
As it is, what we know is that we blew it up. I’m no smarter than anybody else is. We’ve seen what appear to be trucks coming in and out of Fordo in the day before. I don’t know what’s in there. We’ll find out in the fullness of time. But I think if the goal was to destroy Iran’s nuclear capability, to preserve intel and to make sure that you had options to go after it afterward, I think you would be communicating in a much more cautious way right now than the way he’s communicating.
Sargent: Congressman, the other reason this Trump eruption seems so questionable is that there do appear to be serious questions about what’s happened to Iran’s enriched uranium. NBC reported that the whereabouts of 880 pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent is currently unknown. So I strongly suspect that one reason Trump is raging at the media is because media figures are pointing out that. And this is seriously problematic for him. Can you talk about the status of that and how important is it?
Casten: What was the purpose of the strike? If we take Colin Powell’s thing of before you’re going to attack another country, you need to have a clearly stated strategy and a clear exit strategy at the back end.… Trump’s first statement said that the purpose was to help Netanyahu. He then later said this was imminent. He then started talking about regime change. If we take his first statement that this was about helping Netanyahu and Netanyahu said that the purpose was to get rid of their nuclear program, then we’d like to know if it succeeded on those metrics, right?
Sargent: Yeah.
Casten: And I suspect that’s why he’s so vulnerable on that question and that reporting, particularly since some of it has suggested that his own unhinged Truth Social posts.…if indeed that was what triggered Iran to be cautious, he might be the reason for this being a less effective attack. I don’t know. I think it will be awfully interesting on Tuesday because I think last Thursday we were told there would be a bipartisan classified briefing on the Iran situation. We thought that was going to be about a different topic, but it’s going to be very interesting to ask these questions of people like Marco Rubio and Tulsi Gabbard who were saying things last week that were rather at odds with what the president was saying about the nature of that program.
Sargent: Well, just to underscore what you said there, the point you raised, I think, is that Trump’s own tweets seem to have tipped off Iran in certain ways—in certain ways that forced the defense establishment to compensate to deal with the problem that Trump himself had created. And so your point is well-taken that Trump has underscored his own vulnerability here. If it turns out that the enriched uranium was moved in part due to Trump himself—his own tweets—then it would seem to be an extreme point of vulnerability for him, no?
Casten: Yeah. It’d be the first time in forever that Trump fucked something up.
Sargent: Right. Well, let’s talk about House Speaker Mike Johnson for a sec. He said that the strikes were justified. Senator Chris Murphy then said on Twitter that he got briefed on the same intelligence that the speaker did and said there was no imminent threat. Congressman, what is the current state of knowledge among members of Congress right now about what the intelligence has been showing up to now and what it’s showing right at this moment? What sort of briefings have members gotten? What are you able to discuss? I understand that’s a big one tomorrow. What do you know right now? What do members know?
Casten: Well, I’m not on the Intel or Foreign Affairs Committee, so I would not have had cause to be in the briefings that Senator Murphy or certainly the speaker would have been in. That said, the nature of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program has been fairly widely talked about and fairly widely discussed throughout Congress and the executive branch for a decade or more. So there are regular briefings—both classified and nonclassified briefings. And I think it’s safe to say that none of the briefings that I’ve been in are at any way at odds with what people like Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Acting National Security Adviser Marco Rubio were saying in the weeks before the attack, namely that we are better off pursuing diplomatic approaches to getting this done than military approaches, that there’s a concern with triggering war with nuclear armed powers.
And in somewhat more granular detail, we’ve been talking for a long time about how long is it before Iran has the ability to go nuclear? Is it days, is it weeks, is it months? And that’s been a function both of the volume of enriched material at Fordo, which I think our best intelligence is there was probably enough material there to potentially make something in the order of 10 warheads; then whether that enriched material was in a position to be mounted on a warhead, which I’ve not heard anything to suggest it was yet; and then whether that warhead could be put onto a delivery system that could have reached Israel, much less into the U.S. I don’t think there’s any evidence that Iran has any kind of a delivery system that could reach the homeland. So this is a short horizon threat to Israel, a beyond-the-realm-of-planning threat to the U.S., at least on the homeland. So given that level of intelligence, it is hard to believe that there was suddenly a change in information that ran contrary to what we were hearing from intelligence officials, who.… I forget the exact words of what Trump said, but he basically said his intelligence people are not that intelligent or something like that. So we’re—
Sargent: He said he didn’t care, Congressman.
Casten: Yeah. OK. So we’re left to believe not only that the intelligence we received was wrong, but that the intelligence the president received didn’t matter.
Sargent: That is what he said. And he said he had reason to believe himself that the intelligence wasn’t right or something to that effect. And then of course, on the Sunday shows, that forced Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to immediately dance to that tune. I’m going to read a couple of quotes. JD Vance said this, “Of course we trust our intelligence community, but we also trust our instincts,” whatever that means. Marco Rubio was on the Sunday shows as well. And he said “it’s irrelevant” that U.S. intelligence showed that the Supreme Leader of Iran has not yet ordered nuclear weaponization. So what’s your reaction to those quotes? And don’t they also underscore the tremendous vulnerability here, presumably Rubio will get pressed very hard on that quote in upcoming briefings?
Casten: Yeah. Look, I wish Rubio and Vance would treat Donald Trump like the president of the U.S. and not the Supreme Leader of the U.S. This is the same descent into autocracy. Those people should be better than that. I do just want to highlight, because I think one of the big concerns on the intelligence here is if you.… Let’s humor the thought that there was intelligence out there that Congress had not been briefed on because it was too dangerous or could be too many leaks. Let’s at least stipulate that that’s true. If that was the case, then this plan should have been prepared or at least on hot standby and not just triggered because Israel had just attacked Natanz and all of a sudden everybody was talking about the fact that Israel, who clearly wanted to take out Iran’s nuclear capacity, didn’t have the weapons systems to go into Fordo and only the United States did.
The timing of this is extremely suspicious that this was actually based on an imminent threat to the homeland. And it looks a lot more—and I’m not saying this is true, I’m just saying we should be open to what seems much more likely: that Netanyahu knew how to play Trump. You appeal to his ego, you tell him he’s a tough guy, you tell him, Everybody’s taunting you for the TACO trade—and [Netanyahu] knew how to bait him into doing this and said, Oh, by the way, you’ve got a big coalition of advocates for Israel in the U.S. and advocates for the evangelical rapture in the speaker’s office who would celebrate you if you took out the Iranian nuclear facility. And that looks to me like the Occam’s razor—the most plausible explanation—of what happened here. And if that’s not the case, I think the onus is on the White House to prove through the sequencing of these decisions and when the intel was prepared that that didn’t just follow the timing of a separate Israeli-Iranian kinetic conflict.
Sargent: And you’ll be able, presumably, or members of Congress will be able, presumably, to press intel officials and top Trump administration officials to show that to be the case. I just want to go to your point about the ease with which Trump is manipulated. Fox News played a big role in this. We have now seen twice reported in The New York Times, in some sense or other, that the relentless drumbeat for war, the portrayal of the initial Israeli strikes as “genius,” as “brilliant”—all that really worked on Trump. The reporting indicates that he got it into his head that he wanted some credit for what was going on. So he then went out and he said “we,” meaning the U.S. and Israel—all of a sudden “we”—and talked about it in those terms. How do you react to the fact that Fox News figures understood that they can manipulate the president by doing this?
Casten: Fox News already figured out that they could convince him to take someone who’d never gotten above the rank of major and never commanded more than 25 people and put him in charge of the entire Defense Department.
Sargent: Pete Hegseth. It’s clear.
Casten: Exactly. I can’t speak to Fox’s motivations, but I don’t think this was something that they only just figured out.
Sargent: Well, yeah. It’s pretty extraordinary that it worked so brilliantly, as Trump might put it, right?
Casten: Just as an aside, Greg, one of the things that you just find in this moment is I’m always amazed, as a member of Congress, at the amazing level of talent in the resumes who want to come and work in the White House, work on the Hill. It’s not because we have this great pay package. It’s not because we have a great lifestyle. You just get legitimately talented people. And there is something deeply troubling about the absurdly low level of talent that Trump has been able to attract and retain in the White House. These are not people in any agency who anybody knew about before [or] would have put on the short list for these roles. And these are now people who are handling our intel, looking out for the safety of our troops, trying to make sure that financial regulators are working. These are fourth-tier talents. It’s going to take a long time to repair that damage.
Sargent: Well, having somebody who’s this obviously unfit for the job, meaning the president, and also one who appoints fourth-rate talent off of Fox News because he likes the way a tattoo looked or whatever it is, that seems to me to be tailor-made for Congress getting involved. That makes the case very clearly for why you want Congress involved in authorizing the use of military force. It’s kind of important, and it’s important to have a lot of minds thinking about it and the people’s representatives thinking about it as well. That’s my long way of getting to your strong case that Trump has committed impeachable offenses. You’ve argued that it’s not acceptable for Congress to have no role here. Can you talk about that case?
Casten: Yes. So I don’t want to get caught in the legalism of the War Powers Act, but clearly there was a concern when the War Powers Act was passed in the wake of Vietnam—that having a president who can commit military troops, can destabilize regions of the world based on something other than the national interest is a concern. And if a president [is] only subject to the voters’ will once every four years or, in the case of a second-term president, has no further accountability, then the Congress is the place where that accountability has to happen.
To now be in a situation where we’re saying.… None of us had any intel to believe there was an imminent threat to the U.S. In the statement Trump made on the night of the bombings, I don’t think he even used the words “imminent threat to the U.S.” He said this was for his friend Netanyahu and for God. Whatever it was, it wasn’t consistent with looking out for the interests of the American people. One can imagine what he thought would be in his short-term political interests. While I don’t think they had a role, I don’t think we should dismiss the fact that the Saudis are no friend of the Iranians either. And a weakened Iran is good for Saudi Arabia, who, by the way, has a ton of financial encumbrances with the Trump and Kushner families at this point. And so this question of, Didn’t the president act with the best interests of the U.S. in mind, consistent with the spirit of the War of Powers Act? is an extremely legitimate question at this moment—particularly for a president who campaigned on not getting into foreign entanglements, who had a whole lot of people, including his own party, saying getting tied up in an 18-year war in Iraq on botched intelligence was a mistake.
And if we’re now going to say.… Initially he didn’t say imminent threat, he’s now saying this is about regime change? Donald Trump, God willing, will not be alive in 18 years. What happens to the Middle East, having seen what happens when we destabilize Iraq, having seen what happens when Syria falls apart? Do we really want another failed state crumbling regime change in Iran and the region? There’s nothing good. And by the way, I think we got about 40,000 troops over there who are potentially exposed. If the Congress is doing its job, at a minimum, you’ve got subpoenas and oversight hearings starting yesterday. And if those dots connect in a way that to my mind look like they probably do, then I think you have to start the conversation about impeachment inquiries and what goes from there. And I could be wrong, but my God, ask the questions, right? And if we as Congress are not going to ask those questions and exercise the authority we have, then we’re complicit in accelerating a constitutional crisis.
Sargent: Well, the point about accountability is key because that’s precisely why Congress has shifted authority over to the president for war making over the decades, which has been a long, slow process—well, you know this. It’s basically about shrugging off accountability for these types of situations, which brings me to Senator John Fetterman, who went on Fox News and sharply attacked the calls for Trump’s impeachment. Fetterman said this, “I think if you throw that term around, that actually diminishes the severity of what impeachment is really reserved for.” Congressman, your response to that?
Casten: Well, speaking as somebody who, unlike Fetterman, has actually participated in half the impeachments that have ever happened in our country, I think I have a little bit more expertise on the subject than he does. And I would point out that both of those times we didn’t get a conviction in the Senate. The impeachment is the first step. It’s not the final step. Number one, I think it’s naive to say that there is a single definition of what is an impeachable offense. I don’t think any of us would argue that if Trump were to fire Hegseth tomorrow without seeking Senator Fetterman’s consent, that would be an impeachable offense—even though, wasn’t it Andrew Johnson who was impeached for firing his secretary of defense without seeking Senate consent? Right? That doesn’t mean anything other than impeachment is a political question.
For those of us who are in positions of leadership, who have the ability to shape the public mood, I think it is our job to say, given the stakes of what’s here, Should we elevate this and make sure that people understand it or not? Because if we’re not willing to elevate it, we’re either denying that it’s a problem to destabilize a region on false intel, or we’re saying we’re incapable of leadership and can’t move public opinion. And I would ask Senator Fetterman, which of those two things is the case here?
Maybe he’s of the opinion that the U.S. should bomb any country that’s hostile to the U.S. and has, or has the potential to have, a nuclear weapon. Well, if that’s the case, then the president can bomb North Korea without seeking our consent. Is France an ally today? Ask Trump, does the president have the ability to bomb France? Clearly that’s insane. But what is the unique condition here that says that he could bomb an Iranian nuclear facility without seeking our consent, without giving us intel?
Make that case to the public, because I don’t think you can make it.
Sargent: I agree. And in fact, I’d go maybe further and say that I think Senator Fetterman is doing the thing we were talking about earlier, which is dodging accountability here. He doesn’t seem to have a problem with Congress not voting on whether this should be authorized or not, on whether this major military action, which could have enormous destabilizing consequences and other terrible consequences for the country, has a vote or not. He doesn’t care.
Casten: Yeah. Let me try to make the argument on Trump’s side, but I don’t think it applies to Fetterman’s argument. There are any number of cases we can point to in history with CIA black ops that didn’t get congressional consent or attacks on nonstate terrorist actors—whether the Houthis, MS-13—where those didn’t get congressional consent. I am hard pressed to think of a scenario where a president attacked another nation state, said it was for regime change specifically—even if he didn’t say it was for regime change, [he] did something that was innate to that nation’s core identity—and did that without seeking congressional consent beforehand.
We can argue whether we should have given him consent to invade Iraq, but he did seek consent to go to Iraq and ultimately got it. I think that’s the closest parallel we have. And so if you take Fetterman at his word, this would be not only a gross dereliction of congressional duty but a huge expansion of existing power to the executive branch beyond what Congress has ever done before—rightly or wrongly—because it’s saying you can now just go directly attack another sovereign nation in ways that risk destabilizing that entire country without so much as a conversation with Congress. We may have disagreements on policy, but we cannot have disagreements on whether Congress should be a co-equal branch that acts as a check and balance on the other branches.
Sargent: Congressman Sean Casten, well said. Thanks so much for coming on with us today. We really appreciate it.
Casten: Thank you, Greg. Pleasure to talk to you.