The White House is desperate to portray last week’s bombing campaign in Iran as an unquestionable and overwhelming success.
So much so that when a leaked preliminary intelligence report suggested Iran was neither committed to making a nuclear weapon, nor did the “bunker busters” the U.S. dropped actually “obliterate” the facilities in question, they decided to smear the reporter.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt spent two minutes of her roughly 30-minute briefing Thursday assailing the credibility of CNN’s Natasha Bertrand, using the extended rant to call out earlier reporting by Bertrand that also clearly got under President Donald Trump’s skin.
That includes a story from 2020, when Bertrand reported on speculation in the intelligence community that Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Other stories Leavitt clued in on included one on the origins of COVID-19, one on what Leavitt called “the suckers and losers hoax” and one on the “fine people hoax.”
(In 2018, Trump reportedly referred to fallen American soldiers as “losers” and “suckers.” The comments were confirmed by numerous outlets. The year prior, he said there were “very fine people on both sides” of a violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.)
“This is a reporter who has been unfortunately used by people who dislike Donald Trump in this government to push fake and false narratives,” Leavitt concluded. “She should be ashamed of herself.”
The comments were similar to attacks Trump leveled on social media Wednesday, where he called for Bertrand to be “IMMEDIATELY reprimanded, and then thrown out ‘like a dog.’”
Trump also lashed out at the leaker and the media writ large as “scum” for reporting that Trump’s bombs likely only set back the Iranian nuclear program a couple months.
CNN’s Brianna Keilar and Boris Sanchez responded to the charges on-air after the briefing, standing up for their colleague whom they deemed “an excellent reporter.”
“We’re going to continue to report the facts,” said Keilar.
The network also affirmed Bertrand’s work in a separate statement.
“We stand 100% behind Natasha Bertrand’s journalism and specifically her and her colleagues’ reporting of the early intelligence assessment of the U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities,” a CNN spokesperson said. “We do not believe it is reasonable to criticize CNN reporters for accurately reporting the existence of the assessment and accurately characterizing its findings, which are in the public interest.”
