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President Donald Trump has announced that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will host a press conference on Thursday “in order to fight for the Dignity of our Great American Pilots” amid the ongoing row over the extent of the damage done to Iran’s nuclear facilities during Saturday’s B-2 bombing raid.
“Secretary of Defense (War!) Pete Hegseth, together with Military Representatives, will be holding a Major News Conference tomorrow morning at 8 A.M. EST at The Pentagon, in order to fight for the Dignity of our Great American Pilots,” the president wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday evening.
“These Patriots were very upset! After 36 hours of dangerously flying through Enemy Territory, they landed, they knew the Success was LEGENDARY, and then, two days later, they started reading Fake News by CNN and The Failing New York Times. They felt terribly!
“Fortunately for them and, as usual, solely for the purpose of demeaning PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP, the Fake News (Times and CNN) lied and totally misrepresented the Facts, none of which they had (because it was too soon, there were no Facts out there yet!). The News Conference will prove both interesting and irrefutable. Enjoy!”
The administration was quick to declare that “Operation Midnight Hammer” – which saw the U.S. join Israel’s offensive against Tehran by dropping “bunker-busting” Mass Ordnance Penetrator bombs on its Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan facilities – had been a complete success and “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
On Tuesday, The New York Times and CNN published details of a preliminary battlefield assessment by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency that found that the damage had only set back the regime’s uranium enrichment program by a couple of months, the bombs having failed to reach Fordo’s subterranean network of tunnels and the regime having moved out key materials in advance in anticipation of an air raid.
Trump reacted angrily on Wednesday, accusing the NYT and CNN of teaming up “in an attempt to demean one of the most successful military strikes in history,” insisting: “The nuclear sites in Iran are completely destroyed!”
He has since continued to lambast both outlets, calling their reporters “just BAD AND SICK PEOPLE” in another social media post and arguing that any coverage casting doubt on the effectiveness of the mission amounted to an insult to the military.
The president persisted with the complaint at yesterday’s NATO summit in the Netherlands, calling the newspaper and network “scum” and declaring: “I believe it was total obliteration. I believe they didn’t have a chance to get anything out, because we acted very fast.”
He told the press corps: “You should be praising those people instead of trying to find out by getting me, by trying to go and get me. You’re hurting those people.”
Speaking at the same event, Hegseth said: “These pilots, these refuelers, these fighters, these air defenders, the skill and the courage it took to go into enemy territory flying 36 hours on behalf of the American people in the world to take out a nuclear program is beyond what anyone in this audience can fathom.
“If you want to make an assessment of what happened at Fordo, you better get a big shovel and go really deep because Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated and somebody somewhere is trying to leak something to say, ‘Oh, with low confidence we think maybe it’s moderate.’”
He too rebuked the media by claiming: “The instinct of CNN, the instinct of The New York Times, is to try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons, to try to hurt President Trump or our country.
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“They don’t care what the troops think. They don’t care what the world thinks. They want to spin it, to try to make him look bad based on a leak, of course, we’ve all seen plenty of leakers and what leakers do.”
Back at the White House, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also joined in, calling the assessment cited by the NYT and CNN “flat-out wrong” while admitting that it was a “classified, top secret” document that had been accessed and leaked, despite its protected status, by a “low-level loser in the intelligence community.”
The New York Times has since responded to the administration’s attacks on its “fake news” reporting, noting in a statement that the president and his entire national security team subsequently confirmed that the Defense Intelligence Agency did, in fact, produce the preliminary assessment described in a report by The Times and others. So their statement was fake, not The Times’s reporting.
It pledged: “We’ll continue to report fully on the administration’s decision-making, including the president’s dispute with the Defense Intelligence Agency, as we did this morning.”
CNN anchors Pamela Brown and Wolf Blitzer have also pushed back against Trump’s “blatantly manipulative” narrative on air.
Brown said the president and defense secretary’s claim that the network meant to demean American service members was “absolutely false” and “a straw man argument.”
