The White House is desperate to portray last week’s bombing campaign in Iran as an unquestionable and overwhelming success.
So much so that when a leaked preliminary intelligence report suggested Iran was neither committed to making a nuclear weapon, nor did the “bunker busters” the U.S. dropped actually “obliterate” the facilities in question, they decided to smear the reporter.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt spent two minutes of her roughly 30-minute briefing Thursday assailing the credibility of CNN’s Natasha Bertrand, using the extended rant to call out earlier reporting by Bertrand that also clearly got under President Donald Trump’s skin.
That includes a story from 2020, when Bertrand reported on speculation in the intelligence community that Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Other stories Leavitt clued in on included one on the origins of COVID-19, one on what Leavitt called “the suckers and losers hoax” and one on the “fine people hoax.”
