White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt drew fierce criticism Tuesday over comments that critics said once again reduced Donald Trump’s justification for attacking Iran to what they described as little more than a feeling.
Leavitt was asked during a press briefing where Trump had gotten the information behind his claim that Iran was about to strike U.S. targets within three days had he not launched the attack, dubbed Operation Epic Fury.
“That’s not the first time the president has said that he chose to launch Operation Epic Fury because he felt as though Iran was going to strike the United States and our assets in the region first,” Leavitt replied.
She then added:
“This was a feeling the president had based on facts.”
They were “facts provided to him by his top negotiators who had been engaged with the Iranian regime in a good faith effort,” she continued, accusing the Iranian regime of “lying, deceiving the United States of America” and “clearly trying to continue their nuclear program to create a bomb that would of course threaten the United States of America.”
Leavitt also claimed Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal could soon have grown to the point where no U.S. president would have been able to challenge it.
She later insisted that Trump is “not making anything up” when it came to his three-day claim and said Iran itself had chosen “this path to death and destruction.”
Critics quickly seized on her remarks, arguing they amounted to an admission that Trump had launched the war based on feelings.