CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Praises Reporter Who Called Trump Out Over Girls’ School Bombing: ‘Fantastic Question!’

CNN anchor and senior White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins praised New York Times White House reporter Shawn McCreesh on Tuesday for confronting President Donald Trump with a “fantastic question.”

McCreesh called Trump out over the strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh all-girls elementary school in Minab that killed, at most recent count, at least 175 people — including 160 children —on the first day of Trump’s Iran operation.

He asked Trump at a press conference why he was “the only person” saying the attack was carried out by Iran.

On Tuesday night’s edition of CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins, Collins praised McCreesh and asked him what he made of the incident and the White House complaint that the questions amounted to “harassment”:

KAITLAN COLLINS: Shawn, you asked a fantastic question to the President, a line of questioning you’ve been asking the administration constantly about something — the deadliest civilian toll, we believe, since this war started, which was the bombing of that girls school in Iran, in southern Iran.

I just want everyone, who might have missed your question to the President, to hear how he responded to you.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SHAWN MCCREESH: You just suggested that Iran somehow got its hands on a Tomahawk and bombed its own elementary school on the first day of the war. But you’re the only person in your government saying this. Even your Defense Secretary wouldn’t say that, when he was asked, standing over your shoulder, on your plane, on Saturday. Why are you the only person saying this?

TRUMP: Because I just don’t know enough about it. I think it’s something that I was told is under investigation. But Tomahawks are used by others, as you know. Numerous other nations have Tomahawks. They buy them from us. But I will, certainly whatever the report shows, I’m willing to live with that report.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COLLINS: I mean, as reporters noted to Karoline Leavitt, today, only a handful of countries have Tomahawks. None of them are currently involved in Iran besides us. She said, The New York Times was harassing the administration over this, as it’s under investigation.

I wonder what you made of what you heard from the President there, but also what we’ve heard from them since.

MCCREESH: I think this is a fascinating case study in sort of Trumpology and the limits of his power of rhetoric.

This atrocity has — people are — they want to know what happened here. It’s a horrifying incident, and the public has the right to know, and whether our government was responsible for it.

And so, the administration had an official line all week, and they all stuck to it, and it was that, It’s under investigation and that the United States does not purposely target civilians.

But Trump himself had not been asked this, and so I asked him on Saturday, and I — you know, it should have been easy enough to echo, but he threw the whole thing into a blender, when he looked at me and said, Well, Iran did it. Which is something that nobody had said.

And in that moment, I looked at Pete Hegseth, and even he didn’t want to go along with this. It was like — you know, that line from Evelyn Waugh, “Up to a point, Lord Copper.” He would not echo what the president was saying there, and I thought that sort of told us everything that we needed to know.

And so, it was an obvious question for him at the press conference. And he did sort of back down. And I think he often will throw people who are trying to keep up with his narrative, kind of throw caution to the wind. And this time, it didn’t work.

Watch above via CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins.

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