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Should have come to congress, he didn't, didn't get congressional approval i should say but president trump said, i'm not coming to congress, your thoughts? >> well, he also said back in 2013 that president obama should have gone to congress, in fact, put before congress an authorization use force, didn't go anywhere. i think that if president trump had come to congress with a very simple, i need to take out these chemical weapons, give me the authority to do it, he could have passed in half a nano second. leland: fascinate -- fascinating, what don't you think he didn't? >> i don't know. you c...

You feel as though the president's hand has weakened? >> absolutely. here we are whether or not he should have authorization. leland: you say half a nano, why would you get that in half a nano second, i'm assuming you would have voted for it, but for president obama it didn't happen? >> he had a complex authorization use force, ground troops, intervention into the civil war. this would have been a very simple, apparently the entire purpose of it to take out the chemical weapon's infrastructure, if that's all he wanted to do, structure and authorization use force precisely for that time limited...

>> chris, as susan always says, we are in the radical middle. >> anything compromise driven could be radical now. let me put something else on your plate. there's talk about threat coming from north korea, and i am not saying it's unfounded, and yet there's still foot dragging on an open debate and accountability for the authorization use of military force. general mattis went in there and he gave you a political opinion about whether you should have it or not. that's not how it works. you are not supposed to be taking his take on whether you can do this. >> i have supported amf reauthorizatio...

World. we've known that. that's why we're there along with some 4,000 french soldiers na the area to try to deal with this terrorism. with regard to the briefing, sometimes, we treat it like mushrooms. we're kept in dark and your report on the ground from niger is in many ways much more detailed than we received this morning. >> is that frustrating to you? would you have expected to hear what you just heard from arwa damon reporting what she heard from nigerians? >> well, here's where our job, we're not on the ground xa commanders. our job is to understand the region, to make an assessment as ...

Actually violating both of those. what you have is really a need to go after that. and then you've got the authorization use of military force that president obama has been using for the past eight years. >> from 2001. >> right, since 2001, that's right. but in december 2016 the white house lawyers gave a brief that said this thing is still in effect and it's still good. i imagine that was probably to cover president obama, but that doesn't mean it doesn't apply to president trump. >> but lawyers are irrelevant here. this is about political authorization from congress. and you can very easily ...