President Donald Trump threatened to jail journalists at the media outlet that first reported a second airman was missing following the shoot-down of an American fighter jet in Iran on Friday.
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Both the pilot and the “back seater” were recovered by American forces in what the president, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine described as separate, daring operations during a White House news conference on Monday.
The pilot was recovered within several hours, while the second airman was stranded in Iranian territory until early Sunday, when U.S. forces landed and rescued him.
Trump said that he would pursue whoever leaked information about the second airman — which the U.S. government had hoped to keep secret in order to prevent him from being captured or killed by Iran — and pressure the news media to assist in that investigation.
“We think we’ll be able to find it out,” Trump said. “Because we’re going to go to the media company that released it, and we’re going to say, ‘National security. Give it up or go to jail.’”
A White House official declined to name the news outlet in a text exchange with NBC News, citing a desire to avoid tipping off the journalists.
The White House press office told NBC News that “an investigation is underway.”
Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said in response to Trump’s threat against the unnamed news outlet: “News organizations have a First Amendment right to publish stories about matters of public importance—including stories the government would prefer to suppress.”
“President Trump’s threat to force journalists to disclose their sources raises serious press freedom concerns because journalists’ ability to do their work turns in part on their ability to protect their sources’ identities,” he added. “President Trump’s threat should be understood as an effort to intimidate the press and to prevent journalists from doing work the public needs them to do.”
Despite the public disclosure, the president and his top defense advisers praised American intelligence and military superiority, which they said enabled the twin search and rescue missions. The second operation, which included a fleet of more than 150 aircraft, was among the most complex in American history, Trump said. And he described the downing of the fighter jet as a “lucky” strike by otherwise overwhelmed Iranian forces.
Trump also reiterated his threat to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure if Tehran does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a key shipping channel for the world’s supply of oil and other goods. Trump said that Iran has until 8 p.m. ET Tuesday to reach a deal acceptable to him or the U.S. military.
“The entire country could be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night,” Trump said.
The war with Iran is now entering its sixth week, and Trump indicated he is willing to end it — if he can strike a deal with Iran. If not, he said, he will target power plants and bridges in a withering attack that would hurl the country back into the “stone ages.”
“Very little is off-limits,” Trump said.
In the span of four hours, Trump said, the U.S. will execute a plan to leave Iranian bridges “decimated” and every power plant “out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again.”
“We don’t want that to happen,” Trump added.
Asked if he was concerned that destruction of Iran’s infrastructure would amount to a war crime, Trump said, “not at all.”
He said, “I hope I don’t have to do it,” but went on to suggest that decades of negotiations with the Iranian regime have been fruitless.
Still, he said, Iranians appear to be negotiating “in good faith.” Part of what he needs from Iran is the “free traffic of oil,” meaning that the country would need to loosen its chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz so that oil-bearing ships can once safely pass through the vital sea lane.
“I can tell you that we have an active, willing participant on the other side,” he added. “They would like to be able to make a deal.”
Iran’s capabilities have been so degraded under U.S. bombardment that “the biggest problem we have in our negotiations is that we can’t communicate,” Trump said.
“We’re communicating like we used to communicate 2,000 years ago, with children bringing a note back and forth. They have no communication,” he said.
Trump has shown frustration with Iranian officials and with longtime allies who have resisted American entreaties to assist in the war effort, as well as with what he described as a lack of appetite in the U.S. to pursue a more comprehensive strategy to take Iran’s oil.
“If I had my choice, yeah,” Trump said about his preference for acquiring Iran’s oil supplies. “Because I’m a businessman first.”
There is clear political pressure on the home front to end the war. Americans are paying an average of $4.11 per gallon at the gas pump — an increase of more than $1 per gallon since the war’s start — and it is not at all clear that Congress will vote for an emergency supplemental spending bill to fund the war.
On Monday, he once again bashed the NATO military alliance — the main bulwark against Russian aggression since World War II — for not assisting the U.S. and Israel in attacking Iran.
“NATO is a paper tiger,” he said. “They haven’t helped at all. They’ve gone out of their way not to help.”
That said, he asserted that “we didn’t need them, by the way.
He singled out two European allies, Britain and Germany, for criticism.
He said that he told Britain’s leadership, “‘Yeah, I’d love to have a little help,'” and the answer he got was, “‘No sir, we’d rather wait ’til you win.’ I said, “‘I don’t need help after we win.'”
As for Germany, he defended his decision not to consult that country’s leadership before attacking Iran.
“They wanted me to go and tell them everything I was doing,” Trump said. “If I would have told them,” he said, Germany would have “leaked it,” potentially jeopardizing the military operation.
Trump also faulted democratic governments in Japan, South Korea and Australia for not doing more to help the war effort.
He suggested that his rift with NATO allies grew out of his unsuccessful push to acquire Greenland, a territory of Denmark.
“It all began with Greenland,” Trump said. “They didn’t want to give it to us, and I said, ‘Bye-bye.’”
Trump’s exasperation was even more apparent as he explained the perils of the breach of secrecy that occurred when it was first reported that a second American airman was trapped in Iran.
“All of a sudden, they know that there’s somebody out there,” he said of the Iranians. “They see all these planes coming in. It became a much more difficult operation because a leaker leaked that we have one, we’ve rescued one, but there’s another one out there that we’re trying to get.”
He used a bounty as evidence that Iran was desperate to locate and detain the airman.
“So actually, the country Iran, put out a major notice — you all saw it — offering a very big award for anybody that captures the pilot,” Trump said. “So in addition to a hostile, very talented, very good, very evil military, we had millions of people trying to get an award, so when you add that to it, but we have to find that leaker, because that’s a sick person.”
