Sen. Mark Kelly has taken aim at President Donald Trump for bombing Iran’s nuclear sites and inserting the U.S. into the conflict between Israel and Iran.
“I find it interesting that the person without combat experience is often the first person to want to drop a bomb,” Kelly said while appearing Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
He continued, “And that’s what we see here. And what we did last night puts those troops, 40,000 of them, at further risk. But we are going to do everything we can to protect that. Now, we’ve got a very capable military. We’re going to do our best to defend our interests.”
Kelly’s comments came after Trump announced Saturday that the U.S. struck three nuclear facilities in Iran. Trump called the attacks “very successful” in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.
“We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan. All planes are now outside of Iran air space. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow,” he wrote Saturday.”
Trump’s post continued, “All planes are safely on their way home. Congratulations to our great American Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
Elsewhere in Kelly’s appearance on “Meet the Press,” he claimed that “the Iranians were not in the process of developing a weapon.”
“I’ve been on the intelligence committee for about a year-and-a-half, been on armed services my entire time in the United States Senate…but what I will say is as far as we know, the Iranians were not in the process of developing a weapon. They were enriching uranium,” Kelly alleged.
He then clarified that the Iranians had “more than what they need for power generation” and “were in the process.”
“They were doing something we did not want them to do. But they were still, you know, working within the international community here. It was clear what they had,” Kelly continued.
Kelly went on to say that his “big fear right now is that [the Iranians] take this entire program underground, not physically underground, but under the radar. ”
He added: “And we don’t know what they’re going to do here in the future. They might try to race to the development of a nuclear weapon. Where we tried to stop it, there is a possibility that this could accelerate it.”
Watch a clip from Kelly’s appearance on “Meet the Press” here.
