Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) on Tuesday demanded that the White House immediately brief Congress on the secret flight that President Donald Trump took out of Turkey last month, a day after The Washington Post first reportedthat an Iranian assassination threat prompted the White House to conduct an elaborate ruse to conceal the president’s travel.
“It is unacceptable that Congress was kept in the dark and instead learned about this serious threat through press reports,” Schumer wrote in a statement.
“Trump has put America’s sons and daughters in harm’s way by getting into an unnecessary and reckless war, and this administration has repeatedly refused to provide Congress and the public with the transparency they deserve.”
On July 8, Trump flew secretly from Turkey on an alternate military aircraft while the White House said he was aboard the old Air Force One. After boarding the old Air Force One in view of cameras, Trump was secretly shuttled to an Air Force C-32A in a catering truck, without the knowledge of media and some White House staff aboard the plane.
The senator’s statement reveals that the White House concealed the operation at least from Democratic members of Congress. In addition to Schumer, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, also was not briefed on the assassination threat and subsequent ruse, according to a spokesperson for his office. Both are members of the “Gang of Eight,” the group of leaders from both parties and both houses of Congress who traditionally receive top-secret briefings from the executive branch on intelligence and sensitive covert operations.
Representatives for Republican congressional leaders, including Sen. John Thune of South Dakota and House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, did not respond to requests for comment about whether they were aware of the operation.
The extraordinary episode has raised questions about the measures the administration took to conceal the president’s location from the public and other parts of the U.S. government for hours.
No law requires the White House to inform Congress of the president’s whereabouts, but past administrations have made extensive efforts to keep the public and lawmakers informed. When presidents have engaged in secretive missions in the past, they have typically briefed some members of the media and permitted them to share details of the operations with the public once the president was out of danger.
“Even now, weeks after the fact, the White House is not being forthright with the American people about where the president was, how he traveled and why,” said Ned Price, who served in the Biden administration as deputy to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and as a senior adviser and spokesperson in the State Department. “They’re continuing to lie to the American people.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Trump, press secretary Karoline Leavitt and other top administration officials have not publicly addressed the mission since The Post published its report.
As he traveled to Ohio on Tuesday afternoon to watch a high school athletic competition called the “Patriot Games,” Trump boarded his new, Qatari-supplied Air Force One without speaking to reporters.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) also called for a briefing, saying Monday night on CNN that the revelations of the flight were “downright scary.”
“The Secret Service should be credited with an evasive maneuver or, as they call it, a deceptive operation, to keep the President safe,” Blumenthal said. “But remember that there continued to be reporters and staff and military on the legacy Air Force One, which then flew without the President, and I’d like to know what was done to keep them safe.”
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