Additional officials have come forward and spoke to NBC News about the failed raid in Yemen ordered by Trump while he was hate-tweeting the New York Times at the dinner table.
Defense and intelligence officials previously told NBC that the raid yielded "no significant intelligence," but now they say they didn't actually expect to find any.
Asked to compare the materials gathered in the 2011 SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden to the materials in the Yemen raid, the official said, "There is no comparison in either quality or quantity. There is no amazing laptop that we got, or thumb drive that reveals something big. No map to Zawahiri kind of thing."
"But it's also important to note that we didn't expect to gather anything like that. This was a house where some bad guys were supposed to be. We didn't get the guys we wanted and the ones who were there were clearly ready for us."
This provides further evidence that the true goal of the raid was to capture or kill a local al Qaeda leader, not to capture intelligence.
According to an unnamed official, the Trump regime is still claiming the missions was a success because they're "locked into a narrative that no evidence and no one in the Intelligence Community can corroborate."
The Trump regime isn't just claiming they discovered non-existent intelligence, they're also lying about the goal of the mission. This obviously doesn't bode well for future missions and potential armed conflicts. What will they lie about next time?
If it's any comfort, new National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster may not be as much of an incoherent failure as Michael Flynn was. Flynn was still Trump's NSA at the time of the raid in Yemen.