CNN Hits Back at Trump After He Demands Reporter Be Fired ‘Like a Dog’

CNN launched a blistering defense of one of its reporters late Wednesday after President Donald Trump publicly demanded her firing, accusing her of peddling “Fake News” for covering an U.S. intel report downplaying the impact of airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The outlet said that it stood “100% behind Natasha Bertrand’s journalism” and by reporting on the document as “public interest,” noting it had also covered Trump’s “skepticism” of the assessment.

The dispute erupted after Bertrand, the network’s national security correspondent, reported on an early-stage Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment that concluded the weekend’s strikes had only delayed Tehran’s nuclear ambitions by a few months, in contradiction to Trump’s claims that the facilities were “obliterated.” The New York Times corroborated the intelligence assessment document.

Bertrand’s report on Tuesday, however, which CNN noted was caveated as “an initial finding that could change with additional intelligence,” sparked a furious backlash from the president, emboldened by an Israeli intelligence assessment that backed his view of the strikes.

Trump raged on Truth Social that she should be “IMMEDIATELY reprimanded, and then thrown out ‘like a dog.'”

“FIRE NATASHA!” he wrote.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio both condemned the leak as a politically motivated smear during a NATO summit presser on Wednesday and revealed an FBI investigation was already underway.

In a pointed 10-minute opening to his show Wednesday, The Lead host Jake Tapper pushed back on Trump’s accusations that CNN had “lied” in its reporting, defending both the network’s coverage and the integrity of its journalists.