Trump Team Fumes as Real Story on New Air Force One Gets Out

The Trump administration is attacking journalists for reporting on President Trump ditching his new Qatari jet for security reasons.

MS NOW’s Carol Leonnig reported Wednesday evening that the president abruptly swapped the new jet for his old Air Force One on his trip from the NATO summit in Turkey to the U.K. due to concerns about the aircraft’s defense systems. She noted the new Air Force One didn’t have the necessary communications and defensive capabilities for “safe travel amid Iran hostilities.”

Leonnig’s post was angrily singled out by White House communications director Steven Cheung, even though multiple other outlets reported the same information.

“Carol Leonnig is a liar and this article is complete Fake News. She has no idea what she is talking about. She says the White House declined to comment. Not true. We gave comment to The New York Times and many other outlets,” he wrote Thursday on X. “Carol is not a real journalist. A complete fraud.”

Cheung never actually disputed any of Leonnig’s reporting in the post—he just called it fake news without offering up any response. And if his issue is with Leonning not attributing his comment, all he said to The New York Times on a similar story was “the new Air Force One is a state-of-the-art aircraft that has been fitted with high-level security protocols that ensure the safety of the president and his staff.”

He also mentioned that “there are many enemies of America who have their sights on [Trump], and we use every tool at our disposal—including distraction and misdirection—to address those threats.” But none of that language addressed the reason Trump switched planes.

Trump himself claimed rather unconvincingly that the Qatari jet was going to a U.S. military base in Europe “so the soldiers can see it.” In reality, the new jet simply doesn’t have the same command-and-control functions of the original Air Force One. And while experts have said that it would take years and billions of dollars to upgrade the Qatari jet’s defenses to the presidential level, the Trump administration did it in weeks—all before ditching it partway through its first official trip.

Trump officials are on the hunt for the person who leaked details about a hostile meeting between the Pentagon and the Vatican earlier this year.

In January, the Pentagon reportedly threatened an ambassador from the Holy See, days after the pope made antiwar remarks during his State of the World address.

The U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, Brian Burch, told The New York Times Thursday that the meeting had been “grossly mischaracterized.” The 51-year-old co-founder of CatholicVote presumed the story came from the Vatican’s side, and personally called Cardinal Pierre for an apology for what Burch described to the Times as “an attack on the United States.”

Burch told the national daily that he had also asked for the cardinal’s help in identifying “who was lying about the meeting.” The Times noted that Burch later posted a statement in which he claimed that Cardinal Pierre had “emphatically denied” reports of the confrontational exchange, and that the Vatican had confirmed the details of the meeting were exaggerated. The cardinal, however, did not respond to a request for comment from the Times. The Pentagon denied ever making such a threat.

Pope Leo XIV has continually upset the president and a number of Donald Trump’s underlings through his relentless advocacy for world peace, particularly as it relates to the president’s warmongering. The Chicago-born pontiff has thus far railed against the White House’s lethal and unproductive attacks on small watercraft in the Caribbean, the sudden infiltration of Venezuela, and the escalating conflict in Iran, the last of which he said in June was not a “just” war.

Trump, meanwhile, has not shied away from throwing his own fire at the religious leader. In May, Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that he believed the pope was “endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people” by advocating for global peace and prosperity. “But I guess if it’s up to the pope, he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” he said.

Trump, however, has not done a very good job himself of stripping nuclear capabilities from Iran’s theocratic regime.

Iran lacked a single bomb’s worth of uranium in 2018, three years after former President Barack Obama brokered the Iran nuclear deal to limit the country’s enormous uranium stockpile. But that changed later that year when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the pact and imposed a series of tough economic sanctions against the Middle Eastern country.

By 2025, Iran had curated an 11-ton stockpile of enriched uranium, the whereabouts of which remain largely unknown. The total stockpile could create as many as 10 bombs if fully enriched, according to a 2025 assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

On Wednesday, Trump indicated that he would no longer be willing to negotiate with Tehran’s leadership, suggesting that—despite having been president from 2017 to 2021—he had only just now started to understand Iran’s theocracy.

“I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum,” Trump told reporters at a NATO summit presser in Ankara, Turkey. When asked what had changed since the memorandum of understanding was preemptively signed last month, Trump said: “I got to know ’em.”

The Trump administration’s attempt to prosecute alleged “vandalism” at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool hit a snag Thursday.

U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro attempted to bar former U.S. Olympic canoeist David Hearn from the pool after he pleaded not guilty to damaging it, only to be rebuffed by D.C. Superior Court Judge Carmen McLean.

“The government’s evidence is weak,” one of Hearn’s attorneys, Mary Dohrmann, argued in court.

Another of Hearn’s attorneys, Norm Eisen, said, “Every American should be alarmed about this prosecution. It is not a crime to touch the Reflecting Pool.”

The government is accusing Hearn of destruction of property, which could send him to prison for 10 years if he’s found guilty. Pirro claims that Hearn “forcefully and violently” ripped two square feet of the pool’s newly added blue paint, while Hearn maintains that he only touched a piece of paint that was already peeling.

“The condition of the Reflecting Pool was the same after I stepped away from the water as it was before I got there,” Hearn said.

President Trump has spent more than $14 million on the Reflecting Pool, adding a blue coat of paint to the bottom and later dumping hydrogen peroxide into the pool to kill algae, which had the side effect of causing the new paint to peel. Unwilling to accept the consequences of his actions, Trump has blamed vandalism for the poor state of the pool, and Pirro has charged at least four people over it, including Hearn.

Many of Hearn’s supporters came to the courthouse on Thursday to cheer for him, including the former chair of the U.S. Olympic national governing body for canoe and kayak sports, Adam Van Grack, who said that Hearn has spent years voluntarily helping maintain National Park Service property near the Potomac River that canoeists use to train.

“This is a person who has devoted his life to representing the United States on an international stage, caring for the community, and protecting and caring for National Park Service property,” Van Grack told the Associated Press. “So the idea that he is a malicious destroyer of federal property shocks the conscience and makes no sense to anybody who’s ever known Davey Hearn.”

Trump now insists that the pool is fine, even as he is draining it once again.

The Trump administration is not looking to wind down the violence in the Iran war anytime soon.

The current escalation could last a day or a month, depending on whether Iran attacks more commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, according to unnamed U.S. officials who spoke with Axios Thursday. But the brutality and bloodshed aren’t expected to simmer down in the meantime.

“We’re going to slap them a bit so they understand we’re not fucking around,” one American official told Axios’s Barak Ravid.

The dissolution of the ceasefire reportedly stems from frustration inside Iran’s theocratic regime, with more radical components of Tehran’s leadership unconvinced that the previously arranged peace deal would benefit their nation.

U.S. officials told Axios that Iran saw its grip over the strait slipping as ships began to travel through the waterway’s southern route, closer to the Omani coast. The economic incentives of the memorandum had also lost their allure for Tehran as the country found it remarkably difficult to sell oil even after the U.S. lifted economic sanctions. Financial institutions and countries were reluctant to participate in trade that was based on temporary waivers.

Iranian officials were also reportedly vexed that the billions of dollars’ worth of Iranian assets held in international accounts had not yet been unfrozen, despite stipulations requiring that Iran first meet nuclear thresholds as required by the memorandum of understanding.

“Part of the Iranian leadership was not happy about all of those things,” a U.S. official told Axios. “They started shooting and we decided it’s time to slap them back hard. It’s a process. We have patience. If we don’t feel we’re getting the deal we want, we are not going to do it.”

It is not clear exactly how long the current flare-up will last, but Donald Trump signaled Wednesday that he would no longer be willing to negotiate with Tehran’s leadership, suggesting that—despite having been president from 2017 to 2021 and, during that period, dismantling the previous Iran nuclear deal—he had only just now started to understand Iran’s theocracy.

“I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum,” Trump told reporters at a NATO summit presser in Ankara, Turkey. When asked what had changed since the MOU was preemptively signed last month, Trump said: “I got to know ’em.”

Also at the NATO summit, Trump openly pitched the idea of committing war crimes against Iran, claiming that the U.S. could “knock down every single bridge in Iran” in a single day.

“There’s not a thing they can do about it,” Trump said, seated feet away from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. “If we have to, we’ll take them out. I don’t want to do that. They have desalinization plants, we’ll take them out if we have to.… Maybe we’ll take over Kharg island. We may take over Kharg Island, there’s not a thing they can do about it.”

Multiple victims of billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein are accusing his assistant of lying to Congress.

Several Epstein survivors, including four who spoke publicly and two others who did so anonymously, told CNN that Lesley Groff’s assertions last month were outright false. Groff testified before the House Oversight Committee on June 9 and claimed that she never met any of the girls and young women who gave Epstein massages and did not know anything about their backgrounds.

The victims said that was not the case, describing meeting Groff in person, telling her their ages, and being paid by Groff directly. Epstein survivor Marina Lacerda said she saw Groff regularly after first meeting Epstein in 2002, when she was not yet 14 years old.

“She’s lying,” Lacerda said. “Just me and my friends, she’s met at least three or four of us.”

Sharlene Rochard, who told CNN she was a young New York City model when she met the billionaire, said that she met Groff “multiple times in different locations.” Lara Blume McGee, who said she was abused from 2001 to 2003, described meeting Groff at Epstein’s New York townhouse at least twice.

Several of these women told CNN that Groff was well aware of their ages. Lacerda said that Groff asked detailed questions about new girls and ordered her to tell her friends to bring school IDs to sessions with Epstein because of his preference for younger girls.

“She would ask, ‘What does the girl look like? Where is she from? How old is she?’ over the phone,” Lacerda said. Rochard said that she and other girls would give Groff their passport information and identification to book flights, which plainly showed their ages. One anonymous victim said Groff helped her fill out her passport application at Epstein’s New York City office.

“I sat with her and she took all my information in person. She obviously knew my age,” the woman said. But when Democratic Representative Suhas Subramanyam directly asked Groff in June if she handled or viewed any of the girls’ or women’s passports, Groff said no.

“I may have seen a passport—a picture of a passport, but I never had anything to do with their passports,” Groff said.

Multiple women, including Lacerda, said that Groff was also directly involved in cash payments, putting $100 bills in long white envelopes and handing them to them. Groff denied paying anyone on Epstein’s behalf, telling the committee that she sometimes arranged for money to be picked up or delivered.

All of this suggests more lies out of Epstein’s inner circle, joining those from Epstein’s longtime fixer Ghislaine Maxwell. Despite new revelations from Congress and the Justice Department, though, no new charges have been filed in the U.S. against anyone involved in Epstein’s massive abuse operation.