‘I Completely Reject the Premise!’ Karoline Leavitt Scoffs at Reporter Over Iran Question

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt scoffed at The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg after he argued, as part of his question to her at a briefing on Wednesday, that the Trump administration has not articulated the “imminent threat” Iran posed to the United States before President Donald Trump launched a historic attack on the Middle Eastern nation over the weekend.

“You listed a long list of grievances against the Iranian government, going back to the takeover of the embassy in ’79, barracks bombing in the 80s, et cetera. But no one from the administration has laid out the imminent threat that was supposed to be taken care of by this. And the rationales offered by, say, Secretary Rubio, the president’s national security advisor, said that the threat was retaliation against American interests from Iran after Israeli strikes. The president says it was his own feeling that Iran was going to attack. Why is it that across the administration, you can’t say what the imminent threat against the United States was that required us to launch this?” asked Feinberg.

Leavitt replied:

I completely reject the premise of your question. You have had the president of the United States, the secretary of war, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the vice resident of United States, the secretary of state, and now I am out here today to explain to you exactly what led the president to make the decision to launch Operation Epic Fury.

And President Trump does not make these decisions in a vacuum. This decision to launch this operation was based on a cumulative effect of various direct threats that Iran posed to the United States of America, and the president’s feeling based on fact that Iran does pose an imminent and direct threat to the United States of America based on the fact that they are the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. Based on the fact that they were rapidly and aggressively building up their ballistic missile program to give themselves immunity within their country alongside their navy so that inside their country they could continue to create nuclear weapons and nuclear bombs which would of course pose a risk to Americans in the region, and even Americans one day here at home.

And then another point on this is the president found that through these extensive, exhaustive, failed negotiations with Iran that they were hell-bent on death and destruction. So again, the president was not going to be just another president on a very long list who sat back, and stood by, and passed the buck of this direct threat to the next administration. The president had a feeling, again, based on fact, that Iran was going to strike the United States, was going strike our assets in the region and he made a determination to launch Operation Epic Fury based on all of those reasons, and I would like the media to actually report on all them, rather than just picking sound bites from one person in this administration and saying, “Oh they’re contradicting the person.” No, again, these decisions are not made in a vacuum. They are made by the president’s feeling that Iran was going to strike the United States and our assets in the region, and he was not going to sit back and watch that happen. The determination was made that the president was going to strike first alongside Israel, and that has obviously been proven to be the right decision and an effective one at that.

Watch above via CNN.

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