On Wednesday during his press conference on the sidelines of the annual NATO summit, President Trump tag-teamed with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to obliterate the new Deep State leak to CNN’s Natasha Bertrand — who penned the infamous article declaring Hunter Biden’s laptop to be Russian disinformation — that claimed the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has deemed the weekend U.S. military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities a failure.
Trump first called out “Fake News CNN” during his opening remarks (along with MSNBC and The New York Times):
Reminding those watching of his accessibility as President (in comparison to the last one), Trump called on CNN host and chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins and took a dig at her network by saying she “should really say how great our soldiers and our warriors are.”
The former conservative reporter insisted CNN feels that way:
The rest of the questions by reporters — both U.S.-based and foreign — were respectful and on a slew of foreign policy topics that weren’t looking to play semantics with Trump vis-à-vis the smear job to CNN (and then spread elsewhere) by the Deep State.
However, NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell predictably went down that road. In response, Trump pointed to the reality this DIA report was preliminary and only a few days after the strikes, so it shouldn’t be seen as definitive (click “expand”):
TRUMP: Kelly, go ahead. Here we go. Here’s another one.
O’DONNELL: Hello, sir. Thank you very much.
TRUMP: We got them all today.
O’DONNELL: Okay, so, Mr. President, you talked about expecting some on-the-ground assessments at Fordow and other sites —
TRUMP: Yeah. Here we go —
O’DONNELL: — is that Israeli —
TRUMP: — again —
O’DONNELL: — and U.S. —
TRUMP: — it’s — it’s been obliterated, Kelly. It’s been totally obliterated.
O’DONNELL: What is your message, then — sir — to the intelligence community when they present reports, you’re not disputing the DIA report. You’re just — they [inaudible] —
TRUMP: They presented a report that wasn’t finished. We’re talking about something that took place three days ago.
O’DONNELL: I understand that’s a preliminary assessment.
TRUMP: The report was done days ago.
O’DONNELL: So, what’s your —
TRUMP: Wait a minute. Yes.
TRUMP: They didn’t see it. All they can do is take a guess. Now, if you take a look at the pictures, if you take a look how it’s all blackened and you know, the fire and brimstone is all underground because it’s granite and it’s all underground. You don’t show it. But even there, with all of that being said, the whole area for 75 yards around the whole where it hit is black with fire. The group that’s run by this gentleman, in fact, you may want to talk about it for a second, because we’re going to issue a report and I think it’s not even a very exciting report at this point. It’s been obliterated. Totally obliterated. And they did a report, but it was like, if you look at the dates, it’s just a few days after it happened.
O’DONNELL: Understood, sir.
TURMP: So they didn’t see it. They said it may be very severe.
O’DONNELL: Understood. Do you have a message for the intelligence community, though, in terms of unvarnished information getting to you that it’s not [inaudible].
TRUMP: I don’t really have a message. I would say issue the report when you know what happened. I wouldn’t say that it could be severe or maybe not. They used the word severe. It could be severe or maybe it’s not —
O’DONNELL: And briefly —
TRUMP: — so people like you picked up and said, oh, it’s not severe.
O’DONNELL: We’re just reporting.
TRUMP: No, the report was not a completed report. Yeah. The message was probably wait till you know the answer before you answer.
Hegseth then took a turn and lambasted the Deep State leak as “fake news” and acknowledged the “the instinct, the instinct of CNN, the instinct of The New York Times” after this heroic mission was “try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons, to try to hurt President Trump or our country” and not “car[ing] what the troops think.”
He added this came about to CNN because “leakers...have agendas”:
Trump then took back the podium after O’Donnell asked whether Trump was “disputing the [DIA] report...even though it was initial.”
The President turned it around on O’Donnell saying she “should be proud of those pilots and you shouldn’t be trying to demean them” as they “flew at great risk.”
When O’Donnell replied “very much, sir” and “there’s a difference, sir, between asking about an assessment and the skill of the U.S. pilots,” Trump replied there was a “[b]ig chance that they’d never come back home and see their husbands or their wives.”
“No one is questioning the skill of the U.S. military,” O’Donnell asserted.
The President had enough and tore into the liberal media as “sick” for refusing to praise the heroism of those involved:
To see the relevant transcript from the Trump press conference on June 25, click here.
