On Thursday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Balance of Power,” Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC) said that the Trump administration has to give Congress more information on what it’s considering in Iran.
Co-host Kailey Leinz asked, “Your Chairman on the Armed Services Committee, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), as well as the Chair on the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL), have both expressed, in recent days, some frustration about understanding from the administration what exactly the options are they are considering when it comes to putting further troops into the Middle East right now. Of course, you had Rogers saying that, essentially, the briefing that he received yesterday didn’t answer lawmakers’ questions around this. I understand that you need to have some ambiguity in public, that there is much the president doesn’t want to reveal through the news media, for example, but does he not have, does the administration not have an obligation to tell you exactly what it’s considering?”
Budd answered, “They do, and that’s why we’re Article I in the Constitution. Article II, the president and the administration are supposed to work with us on such matters. If they’re going to come to us for a supplemental, they need to be letting us know about these things. And this is a classified setting. But I’ll also say, in defense of the administration, you have to have a Congress that you can trust. When we go into those classified settings, you see members occasionally go out and talk to the press. We want to be open with the press, but not with things that we hear in a classified setting. So, the administration needs to make sure that they can trust Congress, and individual elected officials need to make sure that they’re keeping classified things classified. But we do need more information. The administration, the Pentagon are going to work much quicker than Congress will, by design, but they need to have a good flow of information. So, I understand what Chairmen Wicker and Rogers are concerned about.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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