Going nuclear on America’s woke media when speaking during the NATO summit in The Hague, President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth went nuclear on the New York Times and CNN for leaking distorted early intelligence about the bombing strike on Iran in an attempt to dismantle their claims about the attack and embarrass the administration.
As background, both networks published a leaked, classified intelligence assessment that suggested the bunker-busting bomb and submarine-launched cruise missile strike called Operation Midnight Hammer did not fully set back the Iranian nuclear program, but rather just set it back by a few months.
In fact, the leaked intel assessment found, so CNN and the NYT reported, that the more than a dozen bunker-busting GBU-57 bombs dropped during the attack not only failed to destroy the Iranian state’s enriched uranium stockpile, but also left most of the uranium enrichment centrifuges “intact.”
President Trump, before going on the assault against the media, insisted their characterization of the report was wrong. Namely, he insisted that the leaked report was “very inconclusive” and that the Iranian sites targeted by the bunker-busting bombs suffered “total obliteration.” He claimed a soon-to-be-released Israeli intelligence assessment will confirm that telling of events.
Chiming in, SecDef Hegseth noted that the report on which the woke media outlets based their “political” reports was an early one, and as such was neither full not absolutely true, but rather updated as new information came in. He began, “It was a top secret report, it was preliminary, it was low confidence.”
Continuing, he hammered the leakers and the media organizations who used their leaks to smear the president, saying, “This is a political motive here. Of course, we’re doing a leak investigation with the FBI right now because this information is for internal purposes, battle damage assessments, and CNN and others are trying to spin it to make the president look bad when this was an overwhelming success.”
Trump then chimed back in and started hammering the woke media organizations behind the reports on the leaks mercilessly. Doing so, he said, “We had a tremendous success, and this is the New York Times, I call it the failing New York Times. It’s going to hell. And CNN, which, as you know, very few people are watching.”
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Then, adding to that, he hammered the media outlets for being so negative about American military personnell, saying, “And you would think they’d do the opposite. You would think that they’d want to say, ‘this was an unbelievable success.’ And the thing that hurts me is it’s really demeaning to the pilots and the people that put that whole thing together, the generals. That was a perfect operation.”
President Trump later added, once again nuking CNN and calling its report an utter lie, “Two Iranians went down to see it, and then they called back and they said, ‘This place is gone’. So it’s just fake news by CNN, which has got no ratings. It’s a failed network. Anybody here from CNN, by the way? Because you’re a really disgraceful network. MSNBC, I think, is actually worse, but they’re all pretty bad.”
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: base image from the embedded video