The president was dissuaded from moving ahead with a strike by advisers who warned that it could escalate into a broader conflict in his last weeks in office.
NY TIMES
President Trump asked senior advisers in an Oval Office meeting on Thursday whether he had options to take action against Iran’s main nuclear site in the coming weeks. The meeting occurred a day after international inspectors reported a significant increase in the country’s stockpile of nuclear material, four current and former U.S. officials said on Monday.
A range of senior advisers dissuaded the president from moving ahead with a military strike. The advisers — including Vice President Mike Pence; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Christopher C. Miller, the acting defense secretary; and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — warned that a strike against Iran’s facilities could easily escalate into a broader conflict in the last weeks of Mr. Trump’s presidency.
Any strike — whether by missile or cyber — would almost certainly be focused on Natanz, where the International Atomic Energy Agency reported on Wednesday that Iran’s uranium stockpile was now 12 times larger than permitted under the nuclear accord that Mr. Trump abandoned in 2018. The agency also noted that Iran had not allowed it access to another suspected site where there was evidence of past nuclear activity.
Mr. Trump asked his top national security aides what options were available and how to respond, officials said.
After Mr. Pompeo and General Milley described the potential risks of military escalation, officials left the meeting believing a missile attack inside Iran was off the table, according to administration officials with knowledge of the meeting.
Mr. Trump might still be looking at ways to strike Iranian assets and allies, including militias in Iraq, officials said. A smaller group of national security aides had met late Wednesday to discuss Iran, the day before the meeting with the president.
White House officials did not respond to requests for comment.
The episode underscored how Mr. Trump still faces an array of global threats in his final weeks in office. A strike on Iran may not play well to his base, which is largely opposed to a deeper American conflict in the Middle East, but it could poison relations with Tehran so that it would be much harder for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear accord, as he has promised to do.
Since Mr. Trump dismissed Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and other top Pentagon aides last week, Defense Department and other national security officials have privately expressed worries that the president might initiate operations, whether overt or secret, against Iran or other adversaries at the end of his term.
One of the threats Biden will inherit is a nuclear North Korea.
Last month, Kim Jong Un rolled out a massive new road-mobile ICBM during a parade in Pyongyang. This is a larger version of the nuclear-capable North Korean missiles that can already reach the United States. Fortunately, we are making some progress in being able to defend against such threats. “The U.S. military has shot down an intercontinental ballistic missile in a test that demonstrated for the first time that the United States can intercept ICBMs from a warship at sea,” Paul Sonne reports. “The Missile Defense Agency announced the success of the test Tuesday, saying the USS John Finn had struck and destroyed a ‘threat representative’ ICBM using a Standard Missile-3 Block IIA interceptor in the Pacific Ocean northeast of Hawaii. …
Trump purges a top DHS official who led the agency's efforts to secure the election.
“In a tweet, Trump fired Christopher Krebs, who headed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at DHS and led successful efforts to help state and local election offices protect their systems and to rebut misinformation,” Ellen Nakashima and Nick Miroff report. “Earlier Tuesday, Krebs in a tweet refuted allegations that election systems were manipulated, saying that ‘59 election security experts all agree, ‘in every case of which we are aware, these claims either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.’’ Krebs’s statement amounted to a debunking of Trump’s central claim that the November election was stolen. [Trump] said on Twitter: ‘The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud … Therefore, effective immediately, Chris Krebs has been terminated.' … Following Trump’s tweet, acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf called Krebs’s deputy, Matthew Travis, to inform him that the White House had overruled CISA’s succession plan that named him acting director, essentially forcing him to resign, Travis said. …
"Krebs’s dismissal was not unexpected, as he told associates last week that he was expecting to be fired. His latest tweet about the security of the election, which followed similar earlier assessments by his agency, including on its Rumor Control Web page, angered the president … Krebs’s agency has asserted its independence in recent days … After his firing, Krebs responded from his personal Twitter account: 'Honored to serve. We did it right. Defend Today, Secure Tomorrow. #Protect2020.'
"The news disturbed many current and former officials and cybersecurity professionals who said that under Krebs, DHS significantly boosted the agency’s capabilities to help the private sector, as well as those managing election infrastructure, better defending themselves against foreign and domestic threats. …
"The Trump campaign has faced a string of failures in its beleaguered effort to overturn the result of the election through the courts. In the latest defeat on Tuesday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected the campaign’s claim that GOP observers did not have sufficient access to the vote count, underscoring how the president’s claims of voting irregularities have repeatedly run aground before judges. Meanwhile, in Nevada, the campaign filed a challenge to the state’s election results, asking a state court in Carson City to declare Trump the winner of Nevada’s six presidential electors or to annul the election entirely …
"Even as the president’s allies frantically raced to roll out more allegations around the country, multiple people close to the campaign acknowledged there was little evidence to support the assertions and bemoaned the ascension of Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has sidelined other legal advisers. Giuliani, who speaks with Trump several times a day, has convinced him his odds are better than other campaign officials believe … There is a grim sense ‘that this is going to end quickly and badly,’ one official said. During an appearance in federal court in Pennsylvania on Tuesday afternoon, Giuliani made broad unsubstantiated allegations about ‘widespread nationwide voter fraud,’ yet conceded that Trump’s team was not alleging fraud as a matter of law. … Two campaign officials said Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, attorney Justin Clark and others were barely involved anymore in the legal fight, with it all being ‘Rudy all the time,’ in the words of one.
“Over the weekend, Giuliani and his own team of lawyers, which also includes Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis, attempted what was described [by insiders] as an internal campaign ‘coup,'" ABC News reports. "Giuliani’s team has taken over office space in the Trump campaign’s Arlington, Virginia, headquarters … Ellis told the remaining campaign staff that they should only follow orders from people named ‘Rudy or Jenna’ … The attempted power grab hit a boiling point on Saturday when [Jason] Miller, who’s been the campaign's chief strategist for months, and Ellis got into what sources said was a ‘screaming match’ in front of other staffers.”
Pfizer completes its vaccine trial.
“The coronavirus vaccine being developed by Pfizer and German biotechnology firm BioNTech is 95 percent effective at preventing disease, according to an analysis after the trial reached its endpoint. The vaccine trial also reached a safety milestone, with two months of follow-up on half of the participants, and Pfizer will submit an application for emergency authorization ‘within days,’” Carolyn Johnson reports. “In the trial, half the nearly 44,000 participants received the experimental vaccine and half received a placebo. As those people went about their normal lives, they were exposed to the virus in the community, and physicians tracked all cases with symptoms to see if the vaccine had a protective effect. The data have not yet been published or peer reviewed, but will be closely scrutinized by the FDA and an independent advisory committee that makes recommendations to the agency. … Among people older than 65, a group at high risk of severe illness, the vaccine was 94 percent effective. … U.S. government officials anticipate having 40 million doses of both vaccines by the end of the year, enough to vaccinate 20 million people.”