Bulwark Takes - 2: “I Found Out on Twitter”: Trump Kept Congress In The Dark on Iran Strikes

Episode Date: June 22, 2025

Sam Stein and Rep. Jim Himes break down the administration’s decision to bypass Congress before striking Iran. They explore the constitutional concerns, the risk to U.S. troops, and what might come next.

Hey guys, it's me Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bulwark. I am joined today by Congressman Jim Hines. He is the ranking member of the House Intel Committee. We are here to talk about the attacks last night that occurred in Iran. We are about, oh God, a little 12 hours or so past when we started getting news, maybe a little bit more than that. We're going to dive right into that. But before we do, please subscribe to the feed.

We really appreciate it. When you heard about this, when your staff heard about this, when you received word of the operation, who you talked to in the administration, if you've gotten any briefs since then, I just would love to know sort of the TikTok here. Yeah, no, nothing. I mean, the TikTok is very simple. I was sitting on my sofa last night, Saturday night, enjoying a cold beer when I read on Twitter that we had just attacked Iran. And, you know, I think I I read on Twitter that we had just attacked Iran. And I think I read that on Twitter,

probably three hours after the attack had occurred. That's a little strange for a member of the Gang of Eight. And I think the rest of the members of the Gang of Eight were in that equally uninformed position. But much more importantly, is the constitutional issue at stake here. This is not an administration that puts a high premium on abiding by the Constitution. But there's a reason why when you have 40,000 American troops in the region,

why you really want to have the debate and you want to play out the scenarios and actually have Congress authorize these things. Now, you may like that or you may not like that. But the fact is that that's what the Constitution says. and it says it for a reason. You said you didn't get a briefing, you're on your sofa enjoying a beer. Have you gotten a briefing since? No, no, we have not. My understanding is that there will be, and it's Sunday, right? So most of us are not in DC.

Sunday, I'm just recording this for the audience. We're recording this at 1050 AM on Sunday, so it's been about... And my understanding is that there may be a staff level classified brief in the next couple of hours. But again, it sort of doesn't matter, right? Because all of us raise our hand and take an oath to support and defend the Constitution, which says that the Congress will authorize these actions. And I need to point out here, right? Look, I think the Congress is comfortable with the fact that if there are, you know, Soviet bombers on their way or if there is a Japanese attack happening on Pearl Harbor, that in that instance, the president actually has the authority to respond in that minute, right, when there is an immediate threat to the homeland.

But we are miles away from an immediate threat to the homeland. And this is precisely the case. The scenarios that could come out of this are so varied and range from actually pretty good to catastrophic, this is precisely the instance in which I think our founders would have the Congress debate this decision. I mean, the pushback, I'm not saying I agree with it, I don't, but I'm just going to play devil's advocate here. The pushback, Ron Johnson, for instance, says, well, of course, Democrats

weren't brief, they would have leaked it. And then I guess more respectively, people are saying, well, it's sort of a unique window and an opportunity to act, we needed to jump at it. What do you say to those pushbacks? Well, you know, they're sort of conditions, right? You don't get to ignore the Constitution, right? I'm sure you can find lots of reasons to stop the freedom of expression enshrined in the First Amendment of people that you don't like. You know, there's always a reason why you don't like something that is in the Constitution, but it's not a debatable point. That's why we call it the Constitution. So, you know, again, what is a little startling to me,

because we do all take an oath to the Constitution, is the extent to which, particularly my Republican colleagues, are totally willing to say, well, because the outcome here is good. Now, by the way, we have no idea whether the outcome is good or not. It may be weeks, months, or even years when we know whether the outcome is good. Yeah, I do want to get to that for sure, but go ahead. Yeah, but anyway, my point is that they're saying, well, this was a good thing to do, so I'm not troubled by the constitutional stuff. If the constitution means anything, that kind of reasoning has to stop at word one. Okay. So you talked about whether the outcome is good.

Before we get there, you also did say in your statement last night, to this point, that you call this a clear violation of the Constitution because it does require a declaration of war from Congress. And so I guess the question is, if it is a clear violation of the Constitution, what should be done about it? Yeah. Well, obviously, the answer to that question is that if it is a clear violation of the Constitution, what should be done about it? Yeah, well, obviously, the answer to that question is that the raid is done.

There's no going back in time to stop that. This is not an administration that is going to in any way contemplate any sanctions associated with an unconstitutional act. And needless to say, the Republican majorities in the House and the Senate, maybe with one or two people like Tom Massey dissenting or Rand Paul, are going to be completely uninterested in the fact that their constitution was just violated. And instead, the conversation is going to turn to something that I think is also interesting, which is, does this turn out to have been a wise action? Now, I'm listening to administration officials say, oh, this was successful. Marco Rubio says, this is a safer world than it was 24 hours ago. Marco Rubio doesn't know whether the trucks that Maxard took photographs of at the Fordo

tunnel entrance, he doesn't know whether those trucks were taking the highly enriched uranium to a warehouse somewhere, so that what this strike actually accomplished was to close a bunch of tunnels in a mountain and didn't touch any highly enriched uranium. Marco doesn't know that. And so this is to my point that we won't know whether this is successful for quite possibly weeks or months. Yeah, I was just going to say, so the president last night says that three Iranian facilities have been, quote, completely and totally obliterated. Then this morning you have the Joint Chiefs, General Cain, saying that it's impossible to do a battle damage assessment,

at least for some time, because you can't really get a great sense through aerial surveillance. So my guess is that you're taking General Kane's side of this matter, which is we just don't know until we get actual intel on what the damage was or is. Well, again, there's no two sides to this matter, right? Absolutely no two sides to this matter. We don't know right now. Again, you can look it up right now. Commercial satellite

company Maxar took photographs from space of a whole bunch of trucks pulled up to Fordo. The Iranians are not dumb people. They may be evil people, but they're not dumb people, right? So we've been telegraphing this stripe for a long time. So let me paint for you a scenario that would, I think, cast some doubt on Marco Rubio's statement that it's a safer world. Let's imagine that the regime decided to move the highly enriched uranium out of Fordow 36 hours ago. Our very big bombs just took out an empty warehouse buried in a mountain and somewhere and I don't know if this is true anymore than Marco Rubio knows it somewhere in a warehouse

Right now they are frantically converting, you know, highly enriched uranium into weapons grade uranium That that's a possibility and we don't know whether that's happening and we may not know until you know Think back to the late 90s with Pakistan and India where holy smokes there was just a nuclear detonation. So anyway Nobody knows right now whether this is a good idea or a bad idea. And I assume you saw Demetri Medvede's tweet, I guess everything's done on Twitter these days and you get that, where he said, look, this didn't set back the Iranian nuclear program. In fact, now we can openly declare that that's what they're going to pursue. And on top of

that, countries are now going to supply the Iranians with a nuclear weapon. Now, I'm not saying that is, you know, we should take that as gospel, right? Because who knows? But I'm wondering how you view just the outward expression of that from such a high ranking Russian official. Yeah, look, I, I, the scenario I worry most about because again, the Iranian regime, as evil as they are, they're not stupid people, right? And they could decide to push every button and attack our troops, and that would probably be suicidal on their part, and it would be ugly. But the scenario I really worry about is that the regime, not a bunch of dumb people, say, you know what? Ukraine gave

up their nuclear weapons, and Russia invaded. North Korea developed a nuclear weapon and nobody's invading North Korea. So you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna take the highly enriched uranium that we pulled out of Fordo 36 hours ago and we're sprinting to a bomb. That's a possibility that frankly worries me more than most because again, they may go dark and be completely quiet

and not say anything for the next six months while they're doing that. And I'm not saying that that's the scenario, but to me that feels more likely than the Russians deciding that this is the moment to send them centrifuges or anything. Well, since we're talking scenarios, obviously everyone's mind drifted towards

what are the retaliatory acts that Iran takes. That would be one of them, but that's sort of a longer term or middle to longer term one. What are the shorter term ones that you worry about or that Americans should worry about? Well, of course, the scenario that's getting a lot of play is that because the regime needs to appear strong, they launch military attacks on the 40,000 troops that we have in the region. The naval base at Bahrain and the air base at Qatar are a 60 second missile flight from Iran.

Kill a bunch of Americans. We can defend those bases, but not perfectly. They mobilize terror cells around the world that they have set up. They close the Straits of Hormuz. Hello, $6 a gallon gasoline in the United States because 20% of the oil of the world moves through the Straits of Hormuz, or even second order things,

like the Palestinian street in Jordan finally says, you know what, Jordan's been friends with the United States and Israel for too long, we're taking down the king, right? By the way, that almost happened in the 1970s, so you can spin a lot of ugly scenarios out of this. And to be fair, to be fair, because I think it's important to talk about this in an impartial way, yeah, it's possible that the Iranian people rise up tomorrow morning and say, oh my god, this regime can't even protect us. They're done.

We're out. And they, you know, the next thing, next spring we're picnicking at Samarkand. That, that's, that, you know, That's a possibility. But it's not a possibility that historical acts of American military intervention in the Middle East would cause you to bet the house on. Right. I mean, I saw you on ABC this morning saying just that, which is, look, it's not even that long ago, right? The history of US involvement in the Middle East, look at Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, quick triumph. Everyone's beating their chest, followed by medium-term slogs, and then eventually

longer-term disasters. I'm not saying that Trump's a student of history, because I don't think he is, but we'll see. But with that in mind, and knowing that the strikes have now taken place, what would you advise administrations to take in terms of next steps? Well, we're in this. Yeah, I mean, that's the problem, right? We are now in this.

So you know, You can't put the genie back in the bottle to use a cliche. So what are the next steps? Yeah. So exactly. You know, wars in the Middle East take on their own logic. And as you know, an eminent general once said, the enemy gets a vote, right? So again, I think the president, though I disagree with his decision to do what he did, coming out and saying, now is the moment to give up your nuclear, don't attack us, give up your nuclear designs and come to the peace table, I think that's the message, right?

But now put yourself in the shoes of the regime. You're despised by your own people. You've just demonstrated to your own people that you can't protect your crown jewel. And you say to yourself, if we don't reassert ourselves and show that we can defend ourselves, the people are going to decide to get rid of us. And so they have their politics too. So again, this is what I mean by, you know, we just set a huge snowball going down a big ski slope.

And we don't have a whole ton of options because as one of the administration officials said this morning, the ball is now in their court and they have options, right? And again, I'm gonna say this again because it's not getting enough press. My fear is not so much, although I do worry about this, that they're gonna attack our air bases and our naval bases.

My fear is that we're gonna hear nothing from the Iranians for the next six months until we see a nuclear test. That to me is the apocalyptic scenario because now we have catalyzed precisely the thing that we sought to avoid. Yeah. Well, JD Vance was on today to this end and he said, well, we're not at war with the Iranian regime. We're at war with their weapons program. Is there actually a distinction with the difference here

or am I missing something? Well, I think it doesn't really matter what Jim Himes or JD Vance thinks about that. What matters is what the Iranian people think about that. And again, I'm gonna say it again, we could get really lucky here, and the Iranian people who largely hate their regime, and by the way, like us. What's the lucky scenario, I guess? The luckiest scenario is that you get chaos at the top. The Iranian people say,

now is our moment, the Israelis bombed the local police office, so now is our moment to take to the streets and the regime is overthrown. That again, I've said this 10 times, that is a possibility. I'm not sure you'd bet the form on that possibility. And Iran enters the, you know, a community of civilized nations as it should have always been in. But ultimately, it is going to be the regime and the people of Iran who determine whether that's going to happen. And remember, even if the people protest and get out there and do general strikes and bring the economy to a halt,

there's not a long history lately of popular mobilization overthrowing autocratic regimes, right? You're not seeing the Russian people say, hey, we've taken a million casualties in Ukraine, time for that Putin guy to go. You're not seeing that, right? So again, there is a good possible outcome here and it could happen, but looking at history, you wouldn't bet the farm and the president just bet the farm without congressional deliberation

on this, which doesn't seem to me like the most strategic way to go. For the uninitiated, what virtue, and not virtue, what additive does congressional deliberation have for a talk like this? They'll say, look, we had a, again, we had a unique window, we got rid of a nuclear program that was hanging over the globe. Um, that was a real threat to national security and especially to Israeli national security. We took our shot. To that end, what is your

response about why congressional diversion? Obviously constitutionally it's important, but is there an additive beyond the constitutional elements of it? Oh absolutely, and I mean let's not use the Constitution as a footnote here. I know, as I was leaving my mouth, I wanted to throw it back in. But my point is, I see the additive of having... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair question. But again, the Constitution is the big thing.

But here's why. There's a bunch of scenarios where there are now attacks on American interests abroad. And if there are 100 dead soldiers in Bahrain or in Qatar, the reason our founding fathers wanted the Congress to deliberate is because if we're going to take that kind of risk and absorb that kind of pain, it's not going to be one king-like man who makes that decision. It will be the representatives of the people whose sons and daughters are going to die that make that decision. So there's that. Number two, you watch. You watch. Right now it's a little bit partisan and an awful lot, if not all of the Republicans are saying, oh this was such a good idea and the world is safer.

You wait. Three months from now, if things have gone south, just wait for all of those Republicans to say, oh, I'm sending letters of, you know, Susan Collins will be very anxious and disturbed and everything. They will run away from this because they weren't really brought into it. And when you go to war, it's a very good thing to have the entire country behind it, rather than one guy sitting in the Oval Office. So there's a lot of reasons apart from the constitutional demand for that kind of a debate to occur. You said you opposed the strike. Why? You know, look at look at and I you've laid out sort of the longer term problems, but was there any element to this that you say, okay, I'm glad that we at least maybe made a dent or push their nuclear program back,

or do you view this as they might actually sprint much more faster to nuclear program because of this strike and that's why you oppose it? Well, those two scenarios, I don't know the answer any more than Marco Rubio or Tulsi Gabbard or JD Vance knows the answer, right? And look, in a best case scenario, and I've said this, I think, three times on this podcast, in a best case scenario where the Iranian people rise up and overthrow the regime and there's no nuclear threat, you know what? This is going to turn out five years from now to be another constitutional argument

about whether presidents should attack and it will be regarded as a success. However, and here's why I say that this is something that probably should not have occurred without congressional authorization. Number one, diplomacy was not dead, right? And I know that the Iranians were being the usual Persian negotiators and they are, but we actually had negotiations underway.

And the only thing, the only thing that has ever slowed the Iranian role towards a nuclear weapon was the diplomatic agreement known as the JCPOA. I understand that lots of people didn't like it, but they shipped all of their uranium to Russia and they stopped progress on a bomb. So for that reason, and just because of the underlying principle that war should always be a last resort, I think war should be a last resort and it wasn't in this case. And then secondly, again, we'll see how this plays out,

right, we're now passengers on this snowball or whatever. And then secondarily, you know, we're now all, if I can mix my metaphors, we're now passengers on this rolling snowball, right? And you can't look at history and say, wow, every time we go to war or use military action the Middle East, man, things work out well. So for those two reasons, I really would have liked to get to a place, which I think is a good place to be, where war is a last resort.

All right. All right. Conxpensian Hymes, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. Thank you guys for tuning in. We appreciate that as well. Subscribe to the feed and we will talk to you soon. Take care.