Mother Jones

Steve Russell’s political career has largely been propelled by his Iraq War heroics. The retired Army Lt. Col., who’s vying in Tuesday’s Republican primary to run for the seat being vacated Rep. James Lankford (R-Okla.), led the battalion that hunted down and captured Saddam Hussein. After returning to civilian life, he barnstormed the country in support of a troop surge. He has also been one of the leading voices advancing the discredited claim that Iraq possessed an active weapons of mass destruction program at the time of the US invasion in 2003.

“He Saddam Hussein was trying to develop mass destructive weapons to include nuclear weapons,” Russell said in a 2012 speech. “The record is there. We found evidence of it even in Iraq. That’s a big misconception. Oh, there was no WMD, there was no nuclear program. That is false… They were clearly on a path to develop destructive weapons.” Russell, a former Oklahoma state senator, also made the dubious claim during this speech that the rationale for invading Iraq had little if anything to do with WMDs. “Was that the only basis for going in? No. It never was. It was never about WMD. It was about what right does one man have to defy the entire world.”

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This Leading GOP Congressional Candidate Insists We Found Saddam’s WMD Program