Columnist Mehdi Hasan questioned President Donald Trump and Kellyanne Conway for spending years lying to the American people and now suddenly being mad no one trusts them.
In a panel discussion, CNN's Jake Tapper nailed Conway and Secretary Mike Pompeo for lying that Trump has no intention of attacking any cultural sites after Trump tweeted that he would.
"And according to international law, and the national security resolution that the U.S. voted 'yes' on, that would be a war crime," said Tapper.
"And including the Hague Convention of the protection of cultural property," agreed Hasan. "You said that U.S. officials have been saying that they are not following this, and they've also been lying in public, too. And one of them on your show! Mike Pompeo, he did the rounds of the Sunday shows where he basically -- you know, 1984 Orwell, 'The Party requests you not the believe your eyes and the ears.'"
Pompeo told Americans to "look at the tweet," that the president sent out. The problem, however, is that Trump said exactly that.
Trump then doubled down on the threat to the press pool aboard Air Force One on his way back to Washington, D.C. after Pompeo told the Sunday talk shows that Trump wouldn't attack such sites.
"Kellyanne Conway today goes one step further in a kind of gaslighting Olympics, saying, 'it was a hypothetical,'" he recalled from Conway's morning appearances. "And it is not a hypothetical, because he said that he would hit 52 sites, including cultural sites and 'very fast and very hard' and that is a war crime. The irony is saying that Suleimani was a war criminal and that's why he had to be killed. Here's Trump basically agitating to be a war criminal. He did it when he ran for president. He said, 'We're going to kill the families of terrorists and the women and children.' Maya Angelou did say it best, when someone tells you who they are, believe it."
"He did run on a pro-war crime policy platform," Tapper agreed.
Hasan agreed, saying Trump advocated to take all of the oil and kill the terrorists' families and now he wants to attack cultural sites.
Former Obama White House communications director Jen Psaki said that all of the actions by Trump seem to be putting more and more people in difficult positions.
Hasan went on to recall Conway justifying the killing the Iranian general by saying he was a bad guy. It's an ironic twist given Trump's history.
"Kellyanne works for a man who brags about his relationship with Kim Jong Un," Hasan said. "You can't take lessons from them on who is or isn't a bad guy. Trump has a record of mourning the deaths of the people like Sadam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, saying, 'I wish they were still alive running their countries.' So the last people to lecture us on bad guys is these people."
He argued that the criteria for taking someone out isn't that they are a "bad guy." Now reports are revealing that there wasn't an "imminent threat," and Pompeo had been calling for the killing for months.
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