President Donald Trump is once again threatening to sue media outlets. This time, over reporting on an internal Pentagon report undermining his initial claims about the airstrikes he ordered on Iran last weekend. The New York Times is now warning Trump against legal action.
While Trump claimed the strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities "obliterated" them, the leaked report estimated that Iran's nuclear program may have only suffered a setback of three to six months, as Iranian officials were able to anticipate an attack on the three facilities in question and take preventative measures.
According to the Times, Trump's personal attorney Alejandro Brito sent the Times a letter this week disputing the claims in the report and insisting that the operation was a "historic and resounding military success" and that Trump "unequivocally eliminated Iran’s nuclear capabilities and brought peace to the region." He also said the Times' article "undermined the credibility and integrity of President Trump in the eyes of the public and the professional community." Brito then asked the Times for an official apology and a retraction.
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On Thursday, Semafor media reporter Max Tani tweeted a copy of a letter that David E. McCraw — attorney representing the Times — sent to Trump's legal team, in which the paper stands by its reporting and refuses to retract any part of the article. McCraw cast doubt on Brito's assertions and reminded him of Trump's own words at the recent NATO summit in The Hague, in which Trump said the initial intelligence reports following the strike were "very inconclusive."
McCraw also pointed to comments by Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio in which he said Iran could have "a civil nuclear weapon" but that they wouldn't be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon, arguing that those comments contradict Brito's assertion that the Times' article plants seeds of doubt about whether Iran "remains a global terrorist threat."
"You and I may disagree on much, but I think we can agree that reflects what the President and America's most senior deplomat are saying — that the President may have overstated the case when he said the Iranian sites had been 'obliterated,' that the impact of the bombing raid was uncertain, that the attack did not eliminate the threat posed by Iran — is not false and does not defame the President," he wrote.
"We rely on our intelligence services to provide the kind of impartial assessment we all need in a democracy to judge our country's foreign policy and the quality of our leaders' decisions. It would be irresponsible of a news organization to suppress that information and deny the public the right to hear it. And it would be even more irresponsible for a president to use the threat of libel litigation to try to silence a publication that dared to report that the trained, professional, and patriotic intelligence experts employed by the U.S. government thought that the President may have gotten it wrong in his initial remarks to the country," he added. "No retraction is needed. No apology will be forthcoming. We told the truth to the best of our ability. We will continue to do so."
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Click here to read the Times' full report (subscription required).