The New York Times rejected President Donald Trump’s demand for a retraction and apology for reporting he deemed not only false and defamatory but “unpatriotic.”
The litigious president, angered by how both the Times and CNN reported that the Pentagon’s initial assessment of damage to Iran’s nuclear sites didn’t live up to his grand claims, had fired off a letter full of grievances to each outlet.
But the Times, in response to the letter from Trump’s personal attorney, said it wouldn’t budge.
“No retraction is needed,” the paper’s lawyer, David McCraw, replied. “No apology will be forthcoming. We told the truth to the best of our ability. We will continue to do so.”
McCraw noted in his letter that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Trump himself acknowledged that the Pentagon’s assessment was preliminary and could change down the road—something that the Times’ piece explicitly stated.
“That is what we reported,” he wrote. “While the Trump administration protests that the assessments were only preliminary—which, by the way, was the second word of our Article—and that later assessments may come to different conclusions, no one in the administration disputes that the first assessments said exactly what the Article said they did: the destruction caused by the raid was not as significant as the President’s remarks suggested.”
Thursday’s legal threats—which Trump did not send to The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal, both of which also reported on the Pentagon’s early assessment—was the latest manifestation of the president’s outrage about coverage of the U.S. bombing Iranian nuclear sites last weekend.
Earlier Thursday, Trump wrote in all-caps on Truth Social that “fake news reporters” from each publication are “bad people with evil intentions” and should be fired.
Trump, who has told members of the press to behave more like cheerleaders for his administration than reporters holding it to account, on Wednesday singled out CNN’s Pentagon and national security correspondent, Natasha Bertrand, demanding the same.
“I watched her for three days doing Fake News,” he griped. “She should be IMMEDIATELY reprimanded, and then thrown out ‘like a dog.’”
Like the Times, CNN has firmly supported its reporting.
“CNN’s reporting made clear that this was an initial finding that could change with additional intelligence. We have extensively covered President Trump’s own deep skepticism about it,” the network said in a statement. “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.”
Hegseth, like Trump, begged to differ. During an early morning press conference Thursday, the Defense Secretary lashed out at the press for trying to “manipulate the public’s mind.”
Hegseth also took great offense when a reporter confronted him about how he referred to “our boys in bombers” when there were also female aviators on the mission.
“See, this is the kind of thing the press does, right?” he said, adding that the Defense Department no longer has an “obsession with race and gender.”
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