President Donald Trump is once again threatening legal action against the media, this time targeting The New York Times over an article that contradicts his claims about recent U.S. airstrikes on Iran.
At issue is a Times report citing a leaked Pentagon assessment, which suggests that the airstrikes ordered by Trump last weekend did not, as he had declared, “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities. Instead, the classified document reportedly estimates that Tehran’s nuclear program may have been delayed by only three to six months, as Iranian officials had taken precautionary measures ahead of the attacks.
In response, Trump’s personal attorney, Alejandro Brito, sent a letter this week to Times executives denouncing the story and calling the military operation “a historic and resounding success.” Brito argued the article “undermined the credibility and integrity of President Trump in the eyes of the public and the professional community,” and demanded a formal apology and retraction from the newspaper.
The Times swiftly rejected the demand.
In a sharply worded reply, Times counsel David E. McCraw informed Brito that the newspaper would not withdraw or amend any part of the contested article. He challenged the assertion that the story was false and pointed to Trump’s own remarks during the recent NATO summit, where the President described post-strike intelligence as “inconclusive.”
McCraw also referenced public statements from Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, who raised alarms that Iran may be pursuing “a civilian nuclear weapon.”
“You and I may disagree on much, but I think we can agree that reflects what the President and America’s most senior diplomat are saying — that the President may have overstated the case when he said the Iranian sites had been ‘obliterated,’ that the impact of the bombing raid was uncertain, that the attack did not eliminate the threat posed by Iran — is not false and does not defame the President,” McCraw wrote.
He went on: “We rely on our intelligence services to provide the kind of impartial assessment we all need in a democracy to judge our country’s foreign policy and the quality of our leaders’ decisions. It would be irresponsible of a news organization to suppress that information and deny the public the right to hear it. And it would be even more irresponsible for a president to use the threat of libel litigation to try to silence a publication that dared to report that the trained, professional, and patriotic intelligence experts employed by the U.S. government thought that the President may have gotten it wrong in his initial remarks to the country.”
McCraw closed the letter with an unequivocal rejection of the president’s demands: “No retraction is needed. No apology will be forthcoming. We told the truth to the best of our ability. We will continue to do so.”
