Leak-Wary Trump Pretended to Call Off Iran Attack in Front of White House Staffers: Report

AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein

President Donald Trump was reportedly so worried about leaks that he lied to staffers about calling off the operation in Iran.

U.S. forces launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran on Feb. 28, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and dozens of other members of the country’s leadership. According to a Thursday report from Time, the president has privately been seeking an off-ramp from the conflict as his closest aides warn him of the mounting political fallout. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, for example, was concerned aides were “telling Trump what he wanted to hear instead of what he needed to hear” about how the American public felt about the war. She urged them, the report continued, to be “more forthright with the boss.”

In the weeks before the attacks were carried, the president also became increasingly wear of leaks. Trump reportedly “exploded” at aides and fired off “a string of profanities” in response to a Feb. 17 report from The New York Times revealing the U.S. was preparing for military action in Iran. This led to him carrying out a number of precautionary headfakes

The Time report continued:

The President then told reporters he would decide on strikes within “10, 15 days,” although he knew the U.S. was planning to attack much sooner. “He was intentionally engaged in public misdirection to protect the mission,” a White House official says.

Trump became wary enough of leaks that some of his own aides were the target of subterfuge. On Feb. 27, he traveled to Mar-a-Lago. Aides assembled in a makeshift Situation Room. Trump bristled at the number of people present. “He thought the group was too big,” one official recalls; it included people Trump didn’t recognize or didn’t feel he knew well enough. At one point, the President snapped that the operation was off. He said he would keep deliberating. This was another head fake: Trump had already made up his mind to attack that very night. Once the room cleared, he called back a smaller, trusted circle—those he wanted beside him as the first bombs fell.

The report came a day after Trump gave an address to the nation stating that the U.S.’s military objectives were nearly complete. He vowed to continue attacking Iran for at least another two weeks and boasted that the country would be sent back to the “stone age.”

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