As the Trump administration faces questions about the rationale behind its killing of Iranian military leader Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani in a Friday drone strike, Vice President Mike Pence is being scrutinized for his claim that Soleimani helped carry out the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Pence, in a wide-ranging Twitter thread detailing Soleimani’s alleged crimes against America, claimed Soleimani “assisted in the clandestine travel of 10 of 12 terrorists who carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks.”

The tweet drew immediate criticism, in part because it is factually incorrect. Pence wrote that there were 12 terrorists who attacked the US on 9/11, but there were actually 19 hijackers. Pence’s press secretary Katie Waldman later clarified in a tweet of her own that Pence was referring to “12 of the 19” hijackers who “transited through Afghanistan,” saying “10 of those 12 were assisted by Soleimani.”

It is unclear where the claim Soleimani helped the hijackers originated — in defending her correction, Waldman told the New York Times a 2016 US Treasury Department report found Iran permitted several of the 9/11 hijackers passage through the country. A State Department summary of that report does indeed say its authors found some Iranian officials allowed 9/11 hijackers to move through the country, but it does not specify Soleimani as one of these leaders.

Similarly, the 9/11 Commission Report found “8 to 10 of the 14 Saudi “muscle” operatives [those assigned physical tasks in the hijackings] traveled into or out of Iran between October 2000 and February 2001,” but clearly states that neither the Iranian government nor Hezbollah helped facilitate the attack. Page 241 of the report reads:

We have found no evidence that Iran or Hezbollah was aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack. At the time of their travel through Iran, the Al Qaeda operatives themselves were probably not aware of the specific details of their future operation.

The report does, however, cite “strong evidence that Iran facilitated the travel of al Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were future 9/11 hijackers.” But, again, there is no mention of Soleimani playing a part in that transit. In fact, Soleimani’s name does not appear a single time in the entire 9/11 Commission Report.

There are other dubious elements to Pence’s tweet, too.

Soleimani was the leader of a Shia Muslim military group from Iran, and the members of al-Qaeda who carried out the 9/11 attacks were mostly Saudi nationals from a Sunni extremist group. The Sunni-Shia conflict was notoriously bad at the time, and Pence’s suggestion that Soleimani would be helping a group of Sunni extremists seems absurd on its face. There’s also extensive reporting that in the wake of 9/11, Soleimani was actually helping the US military track down their mutual enemy: the Taliban.

Exactly why Pence tied Soleimani to 9/11 is not clear. It is possible he is privy to some newly discovered information the experts who compiled the 9/11 Commission Report were not aware of, but he has presented no evidence that this is the case.

Some observers, like Christine Pelosi — the Democratic strategist and daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — speculated that Pence was trying to tie the strike to 9/11 so it would be covered by the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF), a post-9/11 bill that gives the president wide-reaching authority for military action against anyone involved in the attacks.

As of now, there is some question as to whether the attack on Soleimani was legal; national security expert Heather Hurlburt told Vox’s Sean Illing the strike likely was not. Proving that the attack was carried out under the auspices of the AUMF, then, could give the Trump administration grounds for arguing for the legality of the strike.

Complicating this argument, as Hurlburt explained, is the fact that the 2001 AUMF — and the ones that followed — gave the White House “the power to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and later, ISIS in Iraq,” not Iran. Hurlburt said, “There’s just no plausible legal justification under which you could stretch any of the AUMFs to include an attack on an Iranian official.”

Pence’s tweets are a reminder of the Trump administration’s questionable credibility

On an individual level, President Trump already has a reputation for dishonesty, having made more than 15,000 false or misleading claims since entering office, according to a Washington Post fact-checker count. Pence does not have quite the same reputation, but has gone on record making misleading statements, like his claims about terrorists at the border, and questionable ones, like the reasoning behind his patronage of a Trump hotel while on a work trip in Ireland.

And the vice president does not have the best track record when it comes to repeating falsehoods around military action in the Middle East. For instance, Saturday morning, a video of Pence parroting the infamous lie that “weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq” while he served in Congress began circulating online.

The vice president’s tweets, however, point to the issues of credibility the Trump administration has as a whole.

The White House’s justification for the attack on Soleimani — that he represented an “imminent threat,” and that his death “saved American lives” — has faced scrutiny not just because the administration has not yet produced any evidence that this is the case (and not just because reporting, such as the work done by the New York Times’s Rukmini Callimachi, suggests no such evidence exists), but because Trump, and many of his officials, lie often.

Vox’s Matthew Yglesias noted, for example, that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, while serving as CIA director, frequently “distorted intelligence about Russia to fit Trump’s preferred narratives.” And that habit continued once Pompeo became secretary of state, as Yglesias explained:

Then, as secretary of state, he misled the public about his role in the Ukrainian aid holdup that led to Trump’s impeachment. Pompeo, too, engages in routine misstatements about Iran specifically, including lies about Iranian nuclear research. This is important because Pompeo has become the public face of the administration on this issue. Although Pompeo does not engage in the range of dishonest statements that Trump does, his more focused dishonesty does include statements on Iran.

This history of not telling the truth has now become a problem for the Trump administration as it asks the public to trust that it did the right thing for the right reasons in killing Soleimani. The unfortunate timing of Pence’s tweet — and the misinformation it contains — only highlights why so many are reticent to do so. As Yglesias wrote, “When someone has proven over and over again that they are not trustworthy, you can, and in important situations should, stop trusting them.”

Thousands of mourners flooded the streets of Baghdad Saturday and called for revenge against the US after Iranian military leader Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani was killed in a drone strike early Friday morning.

Chants of “Death to America, death to Israel” and “We will take our revenge!” emanated from the crowd, according to The Associated Press. Other mourners chanted “America is the Great Satan” as they made their way through Baghdad’s streets.

Soleimani, who led the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force (IRGC-QF), was killed alongside several Iranian-backed Iraqi militia leaders in a convoy at Baghdad’s International Airport Friday.

The strike, authorized by President Donald Trump, escalated tensions between Iran and the United States after an already tense week in which Iranian-backed militia members stormed the US Embassy in Baghdad in response to a US airstrike on Iran-backed fighters based in Syria and Iraq that killed 25.

That airstrike was, in turn, retaliation for the death of an American contractor in Iraq, who was killed in a rocket strike in Kirkuk, Iraq, that also wounded four US troops — US officials blamed the attack on Kataib Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia in Iraq. The leader of Kataib Hezbollah, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, was also killed in the Friday morning drone strike.

The funeral processions for Soleimani and al-Muhandis began in Kadhimuyah, a neighborhood in Baghdad, and drew large crowds of Iraqi mourners. Banners of Iranian-backed paramilitary groups in Iraq were waved in the crowds, and officials from both Iraq and Iran were spotted amongst the mourners.

In the wake of the strike that killed Soleimani, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called for three days of mourning before seeking retaliation, saying “a forceful revenge awaits the criminals who have his blood and the blood of the other martyrs last night on their hands.”

What that response will look like is unclear. Experts have argued it could take the form of cyberattacks, attacks on US military positions and diplomatic outposts in the Middle East, or — as the New York Times’s Rukmini Callimachi has reported — attempted kidnappings and executions of US citizens in the most extreme case. Suzanne Maloney, deputy director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, told Vox’s Dylan Scott she believes Iran “will look for the time and place of its own choosing in terms of a response,” and that it is likely the country’s leaders will use the assassination of Soleimani to shore up support at home before trying to strike back at the US.

As a precaution, however, the Department of Homeland Security has warned federal and local officials to work to secure their computer systems, and the US has urged all citizens to make their way out of Iraq after closing its embassy in Baghdad.

Soleimani’s death reflects the complex nature of Iran’s relationship with Iraq

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo assured Americans that Soleimani’s death would be celebrated in Iraq — and even Iran — tweeting out a video Thursday that Pompeo claimed showed Iraqis celebrating in the streets after he was killed. But the Saturday morning funeral processions speak to a much more complex situation on the ground, one that illustrates both Soleimani’s far-reaching power in the region and the complex political relationship between Iran and Iraq.

For instance, while the funeral was a stark show of support for the deceased military leader and his country, Iraq’s recent national protest movement has brought considerable anti-Iranian sentiment into the open.

In November, three Iraqi protesters were killed after they stormed an Iranian consulate in the city of Karabala. The demonstrators were publicly pushing back on Iran’s growing influence in Iraq, and their deaths came as anti-government protesters in Baghdad had fatal clashes with security forces. As Vox’s Jen Kirby reported:

The unrest in Iraq began in early October, with Iraqis protesting the lack of job opportunities and high unemployment, and what they saw as the government’s inability to deliver basic services, like electricity, and repair badly damaged infrastructure. These socioeconomic grievances morphed into larger anti-corruption protests. Anger over the Iraqi government’s incompetence and lack of accountability has also fueled Iraqis’ anger toward Iran, which demonstrators feel has outsized control over Iraq’s politicians and domestic affairs.

Ben Van Heuvelen, the editor-in-chief of Iraq Oil Report, told Vox that Soleimani was a divisive figure who encapsulated the complex nature of the current Iraq-Iran relationship — and who represented what protesters are most incensed about when it comes to Iran’s influence on Iraqi politics.

For some Iraqis, Van Heuvelen said, Soleimani is an indispensable part of Iraq’s political scene: a trusted mediator, a powerful dealmaker, and a reliable force against the ISIS incursion in the region. For others, he represents Iran’s deep and longstanding meddling in Iraq. He’s also been directly involved in formulating the response to Iraq’s protest movement, in which government-backed forces have killed over 400 demonstrators.

“Even those Iraqis who are happy to see him gone are probably unhappy about the manner in which he was killed,” Van Heuvelen told Vox. “Over the past three months, one major grievance expressed by Iraq’s protest movement is that the political class has failed to establish a strong sovereign state and has allowed Iraq to be a battleground for US and Iranian proxy conflict.”

Van Heuvelen added, “So, for the demonstrators, Soleimani has been something of a villain — the personification of Iranian meddling — yet the American assassination of Soleimani is also a painful symbol of Iraq’s humiliating loss of sovereignty.”

The Iraqi government has condemned the airstrike as just that: an attack on its sovereignty. In response, the Iraqi parliament is scheduled to meet for an emergency session on Sunday, and will debate whether to revoke the legal authorization for more than 5,000 US forces to be in the country. US soldiers are currently stationed across the nation to combat a potential resurgence of ISIS.

Regardless of what the politicians decide during the session, Van Heuvelen said the killing of Soleimani has united both the pro- and anti-Iran factions in Iraq around one key concern: “All Iraqis are justifiably worried that Iraq will suffer the most from any further escalation of US-Iran hostilities.”