President Donald Trump said it was time to “fire everyone” as he called out the fake news about the successful operation destroying several Iranian nuclear facilities.
In a post on Thursday on Truth Social, the president praised Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, for one of the “greatest, most professional, and most ‘confirming’ News Conferences I have ever seen!” earlier in the day.
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) June 26, 2025
“The Fake News should fire everyone involved in this Witch Hunt and apologize to our great warriors and everyone else!” Trump wrote after Hegseth took a sledgehammer to members of the legacy media who downplayed the massive success of the air strikes against Iran.
In a second post, Trump wrote, “The cars and small trucks at the site were those of concrete workers trying to cover up the top of the shafts. Nothing was taken out of the facility. Would take too long, too dangerous, and very heavy and hard to move!”
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) June 26, 2025
During the press conference, Hegseth excoriated the media for “releasing leaked classified data to the public and creating a false narrative that the mission was less successful than had been claimed,” as RedState wrote.:
"I mean specifically you, the press, specifically you, the press corps," he said, pointing directly at reporters in the room. "Because you cheer against Trump so hard, it's in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump, because you want him not to be successful so bad, you have to cheer against the efficacy of these strikes. You have to hope maybe they weren't effective."
"'Maybe the way the Trump administration is representative isn't true,'" Hegseth continued, suggesting this is the mindset of the journalism industry.
"So let's take half-truths, spun information, leaked information, and then spin it, spin it in every way we can to try to cause doubt and manipulate the mind, the public mind, over whether or not our brave pilots were successful."
Later, Hegesth criticized the media for not reporting on the men and women who “carried out a dangerous 36-hour flight through enemy territory,” RedState noted.
"How many stories have been written about how hard it is to, I don't know, fly a plane for 36 hours? Has MSNBC done that story? Has Fox?" the Defense Secretary asked. "Have we done the story? How hard that is?"
"There are so many aspects of what our brave men and women did that because of the hatred of this press corps are undermined because people are trying to leak and spin that it wasn't successful. It's irresponsible."
During the daily press briefing on Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt absolutely destroyed CNN reporter Natasha Bertrand for her fake news report about how the bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities was not a complete success, and brought the receipts for the other times the reporter pushed fake news.
The press secretary pointed out that someone leaked only "tidbits" to Bertrand from a "low confidence preliminary intelligence assessment" in order to provide a false picture of the operation in Iran.
.@PressSec: "We have seen this playbook run before... leaked bits and pieces of an intel assessment to push a false narrative. And it's to the same reporter, I will add — @NatashaBertrand of @CNN — who has done this in the past. In 2020, it was Natasha Bertrand who had 51… pic.twitter.com/Dwy75y3HoE
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) June 26, 2025
"We have seen this playbook run before... leaked bits and pieces of an intel assessment to push a false narrative," Leavitt told the press. "And it's to the same reporter, I will add — Natasha Bertrand of CNN — who has done this in the past."
"In 2020, it was Natasha Bertrand who had 51 intelligence analysts falsely lie to her... that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation," she added. "We all know that's not true, right? We can all agree on that now, that was a lie from the intelligence community."
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