White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has dismissed mounting panic from Republicans over the president’s attack on Iran.
Fox News host Brian Kilmeade to pressed Leavitt during a Monday interview on growing signs of concern from among GOP ranks, asking: “How much harder was the decision when you have people like Steve Bannon saying, ‘Don’t do it,’ Marjorie Taylor Greene saying, ‘Don’t do it,’ and other voices like that?”
The press secretary responded by describing Trump as a “great leader” because of his “ability to listen to people with different perspectives” before adding, “The president wants to see a peaceful and prosperous Middle East.”
Rep. Taylor Greene had posted to X Sunday: “Let us pray that we are not attacked by terrorists on our homeland.” Bannon, meanwhile, has described the strikes as an “unfolding aspect of the Third World War,” adding that anyone who says otherwise “absolutely does not understand the development and evolution of kinetic energy.”
Trump launched a bombing campaign Saturday on three nuclear facilities in Iran, joining Israeli strikes against the country that began the week before and dragging the U.S. into yet another conflict in the Middle East despite pledging on last year’s campaign trail to end America’s “forever wars” overseas.
Like Israel, Trump claimed Iran was weeks away from developing a nuclear weapon. That assertion directly contradicts U.S. intelligence indicating that Iran has not been working on a bomb and that building one would take at least three years.
The extent of damage to the sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan is not currently known, but Iran has since given assurances it plans to respond to the strikes.
Though the Islamic Republic has not yet clarified what form those attacks may take, Iran sent the Trump administration a communiqué in the days before the strike threatening to activate terrorist “sleeper cells” should the U.S. attack, sources told NBC News.
Later in Monday’s broadcast, Kilmeade pressed Leavitt on the risk of an “sleeper cells” on U.S. soil, coming as their talk did amid reports that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem briefed governors across the country about possible domestic threats even as the department insists “we have not yet observed the Iranians call for direct violence in the homeland.”
“President Trump has no greater responsibility than protecting the homeland. Look what he’s done over the past several months to do that,” Leavitt said. “He has done more than any president in American history to secure our border and largest mass deportation. Many known terrorists Joe Biden let in are being removed every day.”
Kilmeade followed up by asking if there had been any credible intelligence as to any “specific threat in any city or state or building.”
“Not that I’m tracking, Brian,” Leavitt said. “I can assure you the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring this situation very closely.”
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