‘Blatantly Manipulative!’ CNN Anchor Bites Back at Trump Over Claim Network ‘Demeaned’ Soldiers With Iran Strike Report
CNN’s Pamela Brown and Wolf Blitzer bit back after President Donald Trump accused their network and other media outlets of “demeaning” United States military service members over explosive reports on the strikes he ordered against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
While speaking from the NATO summit in the Netherlands on Wednesday, Trump lashed out at CNN, The New York Times, and other outlets that published reports downplaying the success of his strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. The president claimed the strikes set back the country’s nuclear progress “for many years to come,” an assessment Israel quickly agreed with.
CNN and the Times both reported on an intelligence assessment that downplayed those claims, claiming that Iran’s nuclear program was likely only set back by a few months. CNN cited three sources briefed on the weekend operation in their report. On Wednesday, an FBI criminal probe into the leak was announced.
“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, wasting, nobody’s watching them. 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,” Trump said on Wednesday.
On CNN’s The Situation Room, Brown and Blitzer both pushed back as soon as Trump’s press conference ended with Brown calling Trump’s statements “absolutely false” and a “straw man argument.”
“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 U.S. intel assessment, that that is some way disparaging members of the military involved in this mission. That is false. That is absolutely false, and that is a straw man argument,” Brown said.
The reporter argued the men and women behind the mission are “brave” but reporting on the success of the mission does not “demean” them.
“There were questions, always questions before this, right Wolf, about whether these mops, the bombs, bunker busting bombs could effectively do the job because they’ve never been used before and these nuclear sites are very deep. So both can be true, right, that these troops execute on the mission and they are brave, and I say this as a veteran’s wife, but also that the initial intel assessment showed that it didn’t fully obliterate the sites, as President Trump said,” Brown said.
Blitzer also pushed back against Trump’s “fake news” claim.
“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,” he said. “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.”
Watch above via CNN.
