US Politics
CNN anchors denounce Trump’s ‘manipulative’ claims that questions over Iran bombing are an attack on US military
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CNN anchors Pamela Brown and Wolf Blitzer pushed back against Donald Trump’s “blatantly manipulative” narrative that the network’s reporting on the effectiveness of America’s bombing raid on Iranian nuclear facilities had demeaned and disparaged members of the military.
During a press conference at the NATO summit in the Netherlands on Wednesday, the president and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth assailed CNN and other legacy media outlets for reporting on an early US intelligence assessment that found the airstrikes had likely only set Iran’s nuclear program back a few months.
The president, meanwhile, maintains that Tehran’s nuclear capabilities were “completely and totally obliterated” by the bombing campaign. All the while, the president may have also compromised Israeli intelligence secrets while brushing off the findings of his own intelligence community.
“I just want to thank our pilots. You know, they were maligned and treated very bad, demeaned by fake news CNN, which is back there, believe it or not, wasting time,” Trump fumed. “So they just waste a lot of time, wasting my time. And The New York Times, they put out a story that, ‘well, maybe they were hit, but it wasn’t bad.’ Well, it was so bad that they ended the war. It ended the war!”
Speaking of the assessment, which reportedly was produced by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, Hegseth groused that there’s a “reason the president calls out fake news for what it is” while raging at news organizations for reporting on the preliminary intel.
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“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,” the former Fox News morning host complained. “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.”
While the Pentagon chief said he’s “doing a leak investigation with the FBI right now,” Trump continued to lash out at the media – piggybacking on his Tuesday morning attacks against “scum” CNN – and repeat his allegations that the network’s coverage was “hurting” the military.
“I first want to just address what was very blatantly manipulative from President Trump and Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, saying that because of our reporting and other reporting about the preliminary US intel assessment, that is in some way disparaging members of the military involved in this mission,” Brown declared following the end of Trump’s presser.
“That is false,” she added. “That is absolutely false, and that is a straw man argument.”
Brown noted that “there were questions” as to whether the bunker-busting bombs dropped on the underground facilities “could effectively do the job because they’ve never been used before and these nuclear sites are very deep.”
She added that it could be equally true that the troops involved in “Operation Midnight Hammer” are “very brave” – noting that she herself is a veteran’s spouse – and that “the initial intel assessment showed that it didn’t fully obliterate the sites” despite the president’s claims.
“I speak as a former Pentagon correspondent and we appreciate, we love the men and women of the United States military who risk their lives to protect all of us and we’re not criticizing them at all,” Blitzer further stated.
“The only thing that we were doing was, of course, reporting what the Pentagon’s top intelligence agency, the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, said in their preliminary report about the damage that was assessed as a result of this mission,” he concluded. “And we reported that fairly and accurately and in detail, and it was not fake news.”