President Trump on Wednesday threatened to sue The New York Times and CNN for publishing articles about a preliminary intelligence report that said the American attack on Iran had set back the country’s nuclear program by only a few months.
In a letter to The Times, a personal lawyer for the president said the newspaper’s article had damaged Mr. Trump’s reputation and demanded that the news organization “retract and apologize for” the piece, which the letter described as “false,” “defamatory” and “unpatriotic.”
The Times, in a response on Thursday, rejected Mr. Trump’s demands, noting that Trump administration officials had subsequently confirmed the existence of the report, issued by the Defense Intelligence Agency, and its findings. “No retraction is needed,” the paper’s lawyer, David McCraw, wrote in a letter.
“No apology will be forthcoming,” he added. “We told the truth to the best of our ability. We will continue to do so.”
A spokeswoman for CNN, which was the first outlet to report elements of the preliminary report, confirmed that the network had responded to a similar legal threat from the president’s team.
Mr. Trump and his allies have sharply criticized The Times and CNN in recent days for publishing articles about the preliminary intelligence report, whose conclusions ran counter to the president’s assertion that the American attack had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program.
On social media, Mr. Trump has called for journalists at both news outlets to be fired; he has also claimed, without evidence, that the articles were intended to demean the military personnel who participated in the attacks.
The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, held a televised news conference on Thursday in which he reiterated those complaints about the journalists who covered the preliminary report. Mr. Hegseth pushed back on the findings of the report, but did not deny its existence, and offered no new assessments of the damage to the nuclear sites that were attacked.
The legal threat against The Times and CNN marked another escalation in Mr. Trump’s ongoing effort to demonize and delegitimize the independent news media that reports on his administration’s actions.
The letter from Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, described the attack on Iran as a “historic and resounding military success” that “unequivocally eliminated Iran’s nuclear capabilities and brought peace to the region,” echoing the president’s own characterizations of the operation. Mr. Brito asserted that the Times article about the preliminary intelligence assessment “undermined the credibility and integrity of President Trump in the eyes of the public and the professional community.”
In its article, The Times noted the preliminary nature of the intelligence report, and wrote that additional assessments would likely follow as more information was collected from Iran.
The Times has continued to cover developments on that front. The newspaper reported comments on Wednesday by the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, who said the strikes had “severely damaged” Iran’s nuclear program. On Thursday, the paper reported that the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency had described uranium-enriching centrifuges at one of the Iranian sites as “no longer operational,” although he also said it would be “too much” to claim Iran’s program had been “wiped out.”
In his reply to Mr. Trump’s lawyer on Thursday, Mr. McCraw, The Times’s lawyer, wrote: “The U.S. intelligence services issued a preliminary assessment concluding that the attacks delayed Iran’s nuclear program only by a few months. This is what we reported.”
He added, “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.”
Mr. Brito, who is one of the president’s personal lawyers, has filed numerous lawsuits on Mr. Trump’s behalf against media outlets and other companies. Last year, Mr. Brito filed a defamation lawsuit against ABC News after its anchor, George Stephanopoulos, imprecisely described a jury’s findings against Mr. Trump. Shortly after the election, ABC agreed to pay $15 million to Mr. Trump’s future presidential foundation to resolve the lawsuit; the settlement also included $1 million to cover Mr. Trump’s legal expenses.
Mr. Brito also filed a lawsuit for Mr. Trump against his former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, in 2023, and worked on a defamation lawsuit that Mr. Trump filed against CNN in 2022. That suit was dismissed by a federal judge in 2023, and Mr. Trump has appealed.
David Enrich contributed reporting.
Michael M. Grynbaum writes about the intersection of media, politics and culture. He has been a media correspondent at The Times since 2016.
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