Karoline Leavitt insists Trump had a ‘feeling based on fact’ before Iran strikes but still won’t detail imminent threat to US
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed President Donald Trump’s decision to attack Iran and ignite a conflict that has sparked chaos across the Middle East was grounded in what she called “feeling based on fact” that Iran would imminently attack the United States and its allies.
“The president was not going to be just another president on a very long list who sat back and stood by and passed the buck of this direct threat to the next administration,” she said Wednesday after The Independent pressed her on the shifting explanations for the war offered by top administration officials since the weekend.
“The president had a feeling, again, based on fact, that Iran was going to strike the United States was going to strike our assets in the region, and he made a determination to launch Operation Epic Fury based on all of those reasons,” she added.
Leavitt, briefing reporters at the White House for the first time since the beginning of the American-Israeli bombing campaign five days ago, comes after days of incongruous messaging and contradictory explanations from top Trump administration officials regarding Trump’s reasons for taking the U.S. into war in the Middle East.
In the days after Trump announced the launch of Operation Epic Fury in an early-morning social media post Saturday, his administration’s justifications for such a massive and costly military campaign have shifted rapidly from day to day and even from hour to hour.
Initially, the strikes were framed as necessitated by Iranian efforts to rebuild the nuclear weapons program Trump has claimed to have “obliterated” with bunker-busting munitions in airstrikes by B-2 bombers last June. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Monday that the decision to attack was made to preemptively degrade Tehran’s ability to retaliate against American bases after an attack by Israel.
“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” said Rubio, who spoke to reporters at the Capitol after briefing members of Congress.
But Trump himself contradicted that claimed on Tuesday during a media availability with reporters after he was asked if Israel had “forced his hand” with their own attack plans.
“Based on the way that the negotiations was going, I think that they were going to attack first. And I didn’t want that to happen,” Trump said. “So if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand. But Israel was ready and we were ready.”
He also told reporters it was “[his] opinion that they were going to attack first.”
“They were going to attack if we didn’t do it. They were going to attack first, I felt strongly about that,” he said.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Wednesday appeared to offer yet another explanation during an early-morning briefing at the Pentagon when he told reporters that the leader of an Iranian unit believed to have been behind an effort to pay for an unsuccessful assassination attempt against Trump had been “hunted down and killed.”
“Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh,” Hegseth said.
Hegseth also told reporters on Wednesday that the U.S. and Israel “will control Iran and will control it soon” by dominating Iran’s “airspace and waterways” and said the U.S. was working to “annihilate” Tehran’s navy, including a ship in the Indian Ocean which was sunk by an American submarine’s torpedo.
