ICYMI: Bennet Slams Trump’s Inconsistent Messaging, Failure to Heed Intelligence Community’s Assessments on Unauthorized War with Iran

Mar 18, 2026| Press Releases

Video of Bennet's Full Line of Questioning is Available HERE

Washington, D.C. - Today, Colorado U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, questioned President Trump's intelligence agency leaders, including Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, about President Trump's failure to act on the Intelligence Community's assessments regarding a war with Iran. His remarks came during the Committee's Annual Worldwide Threats Assessment Hearing.

"President Trump has offered no credible justification for the imminent threat, no clear goals, no strategy or timeline [for the war with Iran]. His message keeps changing, I think, in really damaging ways. President Trump said Iran's nuclear facilities had been 'totally obliterated' in June 2025. But when he launched this latest war, he said we need to 'eliminate the imminent nuclear threat of those totally obliterated nuclear facilities.'

"President Trump has threatened to seize Iranian oil and demanded our allies reopen the Strait of Hormuz. He said that, 'I'm demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory, because it's their territory. It's the place from which they get their energy.' By the way, he wasn't just asking for our allies to protect or to bail them out in the Straits of Hormuz. He was asking China to bail them out in the Straits of Hormuz. And then he said, 'maybe we shouldn't even be here at all because we don't need it. We have a lot of oil. And he [Trump] said 'we do not need the help of anyone.'

"President Trump has declared 'we've won the war, we won it in the first hour.' But then he said 'we're not leaving until the job is finished.' He said that there is 'practically nothing left to bomb,' but then threatened to bomb Iran again 'just for fun.' I think words that probably have never come out of a military leader['s mouth] in the history of the United States of America. It shouldn't come out of the mouth of a civilian leader.

"President Trump said he will end the war 'when I feel it, feel it in my bones, and any time I want to end it, it will end.' But Director [Ratcliffe], the war is not ending. […]

"President Trump said 'We are not the policeman of the world.' He ran on that. And now he has turned us into the world's policeman, into its jury, into its judge, into its executioner. And just because we have the most advanced military in the world, it doesn't mean that we should be in a perpetual war all around the world."

Bennet has consistently fought to rein in President Trump's unauthorized war with Iran. Earlier this month, Bennet voted for a War Powers Resolution that would require President Trump to remove U.S. troops from waging war in or against Iran without explicit Congressional authority; he voted for a similar War Powers Resolution in June 2025. Senate Republicans blocked both. Additionally, Bennet recently joined his Democratic colleagues to demand the Department of Defense investigate whether the United States was responsible for airstrikes on a school in Iran - which killed at least 168 people, mostly children - as well as other civilian casualties in the Trump Administration's unauthorized war.

In December 2025, Bennet voted - for the first time in his career - against the National Defense Authorization Act because of his grave concerns about President Trump's actions and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's lawless Department of Defense.

During last year's Worldwide Threats Hearing, Bennet criticized CIA Director Ratcliffe over concerns that senior Trump Administration officials shared classified information over a Signal chat. Since March 2025, Bennet has called for Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard to resign, citing her false comments to Congress that classified information was not shared in that Signal chat. Bennet reiterated this call to Gabbard after she released a hyper-partisan report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Russia's intervention in the 2016 presidential election, which exposed sensitive intelligence sources and put U.S. interests at risk. In January 2025, Bennet also fiercely questioned Gabbard during her DNI confirmation hearing.

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