CNN anchor Pamela Brown defended the network from Donald Trump’s attacks after the president accused it of trying to “demean” U.S. forces by reporting on the impact of their Iran strikes.
Brown told her Situation Room co-anchor Wolf Blitzer that she needed to address what she called Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “blatantly manipulative” characterizations of CNN’s reporting and depiction of U.S. forces.
“I first want to just address what was very blatantly manipulative from President Trump and Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, saying that because of our reporting and other reporting about the preliminary U.S. intel assessment, that that is some way disparaging members of the military involved in this mission,” Brown said. “That is false. That is absolutely false, and that is a straw-man argument.”
CNN first reported an early U.S. intelligence assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency showed the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities only set the country’s nuclear program back by months, a story matched by various news outlets.
Brown commended “those brave men and women” who participated in the mission, but she acknowledged that “there were questions” about whether the B-2 bombs deployed during Saturday’s strike could effectively wipe out the Iranian facilities.
“These nuclear sites are very deep,” she said. “So both can be true, right, that these troops execute on the mission and they are brave, and I say this as a veteran‘s wife, but also that the initial intel assessment showed that it didn‘t fully obliterate the sites.”
Blitzer agreed with Brown, saying CNN solely reported what the DIA report said.
“We appreciate, we love the men and women of the United States military who risked their lives to protect all of us, and we‘re not criticizing them at all,” Blitzer added. “The only thing that we were doing was, of course, reporting what the Pentagon‘s top intelligence agency, the DIA… said in their preliminary report about the damage that was assessed as a result of this mission, and we reported that fairly and accurately and in detail, and it was not fake news.”
Trump has launched a barrage of attacks focused on CNN and The New York Times, accusing the organizations and CNN reporter Natasha Bertrand specifically of insulting the military. Trump argued on Truth Social on Wednesday that Bertrand should be “FIRED.”
“I watched her for three days doing Fake News. She should be IMMEDIATELY reprimanded, and then thrown out ‘like a dog,’” Trump wrote. “She lied on the Laptop from Hell Story, and now she lied on the Nuclear Sites Story, attempting to destroy our Patriot Pilots by making them look bad when, in fact, they did a GREAT job and hit ‘pay dirt’ — TOTAL OBLITERATION!”
CNN defended Bertrand in a statement on Wednesday and said it stands “100% behind” her work and the report.
“However, 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,” it said in a statement.
The Times also stood by its reporting and said that, despite Trump and his national security team’s “fake news” claims, the government confirmed the existence of the report.
“So their statement was fake, not The Times’s reporting,” the paper said in a statement. “We’ll continue to report fully on the administration’s decision-making, including the president’s dispute with the Defense Intelligence Agency, as we did this morning.”
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