Trump's Pentagon can't explain his own Iran war to senators, but his stock filings already show the profit.

…(cont) The shooting kept going. On September 6th, with U.S. and Iranian forces trading strikes, Energy Secretary Chris Wright went on four Sunday shows to tell the country the gas prices climbing that weekend were nothing to worry about. On the 9th, the president told reporters the war would not be over before the midterms. The next day, his defense secretary sat down with CBS — the interview itself had been taped a month before — and said the United States has "all the control in the world," citing "historic" devastation to Iran's military capabilities.

Control, it turns out, does not come itemized. On Thursday, Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby briefed the Senate Armed Services Committee behind closed doors on the war and the administration's strategy, and lawmakers from both parties walked out saying they still had no clear answer. The president, briefing reporters that same morning, described the next move as binary: stay the course, or "go in and annihilate them." A price tag was not on offer from either option, and the public reached its own verdict without waiting for one — a Fox News poll out that week found 71 percent of voters think this administration has no plan to end the war, and 60 percent now call the whole operation wrong.

Thursday also produced a bill nobody in that hearing room could itemize: officials confirmed Iran had shot down at least two more American drones. Drones cost money. Somebody wrote that check; the committee wasn't told how much.

Here is the reconciliation, hon. The Pentagon's books on this war don't close. The president's brokerage statement's books do. When the number the Armed Services Committee is owed shows up instead on a disclosure form filed with a completely different office, that isn't a missing figure. That's a figure that was never meant to be theirs to see.