Donald Trump has again threatened news outlets over coverage he dislikes, this time The New York Times and CNN over their reporting on a preliminary intelligence assessment that raised doubts that the U.S. strikes on Iran destroyed their nuclear program.
The White House has been on the warpath against journalists over their reporting, even though the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has acknowledged the existence of the intelligence assessment. Trump and his allies have go so far as to accuse CNN and the Times of denigrating the members of the military who carried out the strikes, even though their reporting was not critical of how the mission was carried out.
Trump has insisted that Iran’s nuclear capabilities were “obliterated.”
Per the Times, Trump demanded a retraction and an apology, as his attorney, Alejandro Brito, described the reporting as “false,” “defamatory” and “unpatriotic.”
David McCraw, senior vice president and deputy general counsel for the Times, “No retraction is needed. No apology will be forthcoming.”
McGraw wrote to Brito, “While the Trump administration protests that the assessments were only preliminary — which, by the way, was the second word of our article — and that later assessments may come to different conclusions, no one in the administration disputes that the first assessments said exactly what the article said they did: the destruction caused by the raid was not as significant as the president’s remarks suggested.”
He added that the “American public has a right to know whether the attack on Iran — funded by the tax dollars and of enormous consequence to every citizen — was a success. We rely on our intelligence services to provide the kind of impartial assessment that we all need in a democracy to judge our country’s foreign policy and the quality of our leaders’ decisions. It would be irresponsible for a news organization to suppress that information and deny the public the right to hear it. And it would be even more irresponsible for a president to use the threat of libel litigation to try to silence a publication that dared to report that the trained, professional and patriotic intelligence experts employed by the U.S. government thought that the president may have gotten it wrong in his initial remarks to the country.”
CNN also received a legal threat. A spokesperson said “we can confirm we received a letter and responded to it, rejecting the claims in the letter.”
Trump has called for reporters on the stories to be fired, but has singled out CNN’s Natasha Bertrand. On Thursday, at the press briefing, Leavitt attacked Bertrand’s past reporting. The network has said that they stand behind “100% behind” Bertrand and her work.
The president’s legal threat is not unusual. He has previously sued the Times and CNN, but the various lawsuits were dismissed. He sued CBS over the way that a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris was edited. The network has said that the lawsuit is meritless, as do a number of legal scholars, but its attorneys are in settlement talks with Trump’s team. CBS parent Paramount Global is seeking administration approval for its merger with Skydance Media.
Earlier on Thursday, Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, held a press conference in which he also bashed media outlets for reporting on the intelligence report.
“You cheer against Trump so hard, in your DNA and in your blood, cheer against Trump because you want him not to be successful so bad, you have to cheer against the efficacy of these strikes,” Hegseth said to the journalists at the Pentagon.
He said that he was “urging caution about premising an entire stories on biased leaks to biased publications to make something look bad. How about we take a beat, recognize first the success of our warriors, hold them up, tell their stories, celebrate that, wave an American flag, be proud of what we accomplished.”
