Press Sec. Leavitt: Thomas Massie ‘Should Be a Democrat’

KILMEADE: “So as this operation takes place, Democrats said they were not told about it, they were left in the dark, and they said usually there’s bipartisan calls for this, and they didn’t know about it. Here is Republican Thomas Massie.”
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MASSIE: “We haven’t been briefed, they should have called us all back, and frankly, we should have debated this War Powers Resolution that Ro Khanna and I offered instead of staying on vacation and doing fundraisers and saying, ‘Oh, well, the president’s got this under control. We’re going to cede our constitutional authority.’”
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KILMEADE: “Should you have called everybody back”
LEAVITT: “First of all, we did make bipartisan calls. Thomas Massie and the Democrats — he should be a Democrat because he’s more aligned with them than with the Republican Party — were given notice. the White House made calls to congressional leadership. They were bipartisan calls. In fact, Hakeem Jeffries couldn’t be reached. We tried him before the strike, and he didn’t pick up the phone, but he was briefed after, as well as Chuck Schumer was briefed prior to the strike. So this notion that CNN ran with that the White House did not give a heads up to Democrats is just completely false. In fact, both Senator Schumer’s office and CNN had to retract that story last night because it was a blatant lie, and we showed them the timestamps from those phone calls. But I want to add something —“
KILMEADE: “Right.
LEAVITT: “— to Thomas Massie’s false points. the White House was not obligated to call anyone because the president was acting within his legal authority under Article II of the Constitution as commander-in-chief of the president of the United States. We gave these calls as a courtesy, and the Democrats are lying about this because they can’t talk about the truth of the success of that operation and the success of our United States military and the success of this president and this administration in doing something that past administrations, Democrats too, have only dreamed about.”
KILMEADE: “Yeah, but President Obama did not ask for permission to bomb Libya in 2011.”
LEAVITT: “That’s right.”