Lloyd Austin hid Iran drone attack during Senate Iraq vote: GOP lawmakers

WASHINGTON – Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin failed to notify Congress of a deadly Iranian-backed militia’s drone attack on US forces in Syria last week — even though senators were taking votes on a key bill dealing with military force in the region, Republican lawmakers charged Tuesday.

Roughly 13 hours passed before Congress was informed Thursday evening that a US contractor had been killed and five troops had been injured in an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps drone attack on American forces in Syria and that the US had later killed 19 IRGC fighters in retaliatory strikes.

“That very day, the Senate was considering several significant votes relating to the use of force against Iran, and yet no member of the Senate, to my knowledge, was told that day about an attack by this very adversary while we were voting on issues involving them,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) told Austin during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

The Senate has been working for several days on a bill repealing the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force against Iraq, which would further reduce America’s footprint in the Middle East following the August 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Explaining the delay, Austin said the Pentagon decided to wait to notify Congress until after US forces could complete the counterattack due to time constraints.

“After every operation, we’re required to brief Congress, and we lean forward and try to ensure that Congress is briefed before we conduct an operation,” he said. “In this case, we had an attack and we launched an attack on the adversaries in the same short period of time. Because of that compressed time, we did both notifications at the same time.”

But several Republicans accused the Pentagon of deliberately delaying notification to keep the deadly strike from influencing votes on an amendment put forward by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) that would have delayed the AUMF repeal until President Biden could certify “that Iran has stopped providing financial, technical, and material support to terrorist organizations and other violent groups in Iraq and Syria.”

The amendment was voted down 63-32 – hours before Congress was informed of the IRGC attack.

“Secretary Austin, I don’t believe you,” said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) “I believe that your office specifically withheld notification of this deadly strike against Americans because the Rubio amendment on which we voted midday directly touched on exactly this scenario – not repealing these use of force resolutions if the president couldn’t certify that Iran was no longer attacking us in Iran and Syria.”

Austin apologized for the postponed briefing, but said Cotton’s accusations were “absolutely not true.”

“We should have notified you earlier and will endeavor to do so [going forward,]” he said. “Our goal is to make sure that that we keep you informed and we will do everything within our power to make sure that we improve our performance.”

Unmoved, Cotton told Austin that “nothing you can say is gonna change my belief about that.”

Wicker also expressed skepticism, noting that Austin’s office has dedicated legislative affairs personnel who should have been aware of the Thursday votes.

“These troops are there to ensure that ISIS does not pose a threat to the United States,” Wicker said. “I found it hard to believe that no one in the executive branch was tracking the votes on the Senate floor or thought of the nexus between our decisions and the very acts that were going on on the other side of the globe.”

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby on Tuesday defended the Pentagon’s choice, saying “we did the best we could to inform members of Congress as things were unfolding on a very busy, very stressful day.”

“I think it’s also important to remember [that] time was pretty compressed that day,” he said. “We took an attack which killed an American citizen and wounded a half a dozen others and retaliated against that attack on the very same day.”

“So there was an awful lot going on in time and space and in a very compressed timeline,” he added.

Regardless, Wicker called it “unacceptable” that the Senate was not told of the IRGC attack “in a timely manner.”

“We’re all in this together, we’re all on the same side here,” Wicker said. “I would strongly prefer that the Biden administration treat the Congress as a partner moving forward.”