President Trump is coming under attack from the media because of confusion (deliberate or otherwise) about whether Qassem Soleimani was planning future attacks.  What the media have failed to explain is why a mass murderer's future plans suddenly matter.

When Soleimani was originally killed, the official line was that, in addition to the tens of thousands dead due to the terrorist chief's direct or proxy actions, including more than 600 Americans, Soleimani was planning an imminent attack.  Almost instantly, though, Democrats, especially those in the media, began to challenge just how "imminent" that attack really was.  On Friday, secretary of state Mike Pompeo conceded that Soleimani had planned attacks but that intelligence hadn't placed them on a specific calendar of upcoming events, while defense secretary Mark Esper said the timeline for more attacks was "days."

Meanwhile, also on Friday, President Trump told Laura Ingraham that the attacks would be directed at four embassies, including the embassy in Baghdad.  By Sunday, however, a gleeful New York Times was stating that Secretary Esper had challenged Trump's narrative:

They had to kill him because he was planning an "imminent" attack. But how imminent they could not say. Where they could not say. When they could not say. And really, it was more about what he had already done. Or actually it was to stop him from hitting an American embassy. Or four embassies. Or not.

For 10 days, President Trump and his team have struggled to describe the reasoning behind the decision to launch a drone strike against Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the commander of Iran's elite security forces, propelling the two nations to the brink of war. Officials agree they had intelligence indicating danger, but the public explanations have shifted by the day and sometimes by the hour.

On Sunday came the latest twist. Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said he was never shown any specific piece of evidence that Iran was planning an attack on four American embassies, as Mr. Trump had claimed just two days earlier.

The question that no one is asking is, why does this matter?

When President Obama finally said "yes" to killing Osama bin Laden, nobody challenged the decision by claiming that bin Laden was a useless relic of past terrorism who spent his time locked in a room watching porn.  When Hillary crowed, "We came, we saw, he died," about Moammar Gaddafi's death in 2011, the same crowd now seeking detailed information about Soleimani's future plans did not point out that Gaddafi had normalized relations with the West and renounced terrorism eight years before.  And much as the media begrudged the fact that it was Trump who killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi this past October, no one demanded that Trump prove that al-Baghdadi was planning future ISIS terrorism.

The point is that it should be completely irrelevant what Soleimani's future plans were.  It is enough that he was a worldwide terrorist kingpin for more than two decades, that he was a legitimate military target, that he would definitely kill again at some future time, and that the American military finally had enough intelligence to kill him.  The media's quibbles about "imminence" ought to be dismissed as just that — quibbles from an institution more concerned with attacking Trump than with celebrating the just retribution rained down from the American military on a mass murderer.