Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has acknowledged large gaps in the details of future attacks the US has used to justify killing the Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani.

Pompeo told Fox News he did not know exactly when or where such an attack would have taken place.

But he still insisted: "There is no doubt that there were a series of imminent attacks that were being plotted by Qassem Soleimani."

He also said he believed he and other White House officials did a "dynamite job" briefing lawmakers on the Iran attack, despite heavy criticism from some of them.

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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has acknowledged large gaps in the intelligence suggesting Iran would imminently launch attacks on Americans — the threat assessment used to justify killing Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

"There is no doubt that there were a series of imminent attacks that were being plotted by Qassem Soleimani," Pompeo said during a Fox News interview that aired Thursday.

"We don't know precisely when, and we don't know precisely where, but it was real."

Soleimani was the commander of Iran's elite Quds Force, a branch of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps that specializes in unconventional warfare beyond the country's borders. President Donald Trump ordered Soleimani's killing in a US airstrike in Baghdad last week without explicit approval from Congress.

The attack raised tensions between Tehran and the US, and Iran responded by launching a missile barrage on Iraqi bases housing US troops.

No US forces were killed or wounded during that attack, but the unilateral decision to kill an Iranian official, as well as the increased US troop presence in the Middle East prompted by it, has driven a wedge between the Trump administration and congressional lawmakers.

On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of senators excoriated a group of US military and intelligence chiefs, including Pompeo, who had briefed them on Trump's decision to kill Soleimani.

The closed-door briefing was described by Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah as "probably the worst briefing, at least on a military issue, I've seen in nine years I've been here."

"There was no raw evidence presented that this was an imminent threat," Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington said.

Despite the criticism, Pompeo said in Thursday's interview that he believed he did a "dynamite job" during the briefing and that US officials "did our level best to present them with all the facts that we could in that setting."

"I got lots of different feedback from the briefing," Pompeo said, smiling.

Military officials in recent days have also backed the veracity of the intelligence they claim indicated Soleimani was ready for an attack.

"I'll stand by the intelligence I saw," US Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Monday. "That was compelling, it was imminent, and it was very clear in scale."

The publicly vague reasoning behind the Trump administration's attack prompted the House of Representatives to pass a resolution on Thursday meant to limit the president's use of military force against Iran.

Lawmakers voted 224 to 194, mostly along party lines, for the War Powers Resolution, which now heads to the Senate for a vote.

Trump railed against the measure Thursday night at a campaign rally in Toledo, Ohio, suggesting he didn't trust lawmakers not to leak US military plans to the media.

"You should get permission from Congress," Trump said, mockingly. "You should tell us what you're going to do so we can call up the fake news and we can leak it."