White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt put a quick stop to The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg, who tried to claim that the Trump administration had not properly outlined the imminent threat posed by the Iranian regime.
Leavitt rejected “the premise of the question” out of hand, then laid out a list of Trump administration officials who had, in fact, made the case for Iran posing an imminent and ongoing threat to the United States and to American interests.
WATCH:
.@PressSec: “@POTUS does not make these decisions in a vacuum. This decision to launch this operation was based on a cumulative effect of various direct threats that Iran posed to the United States of America.” pic.twitter.com/hJtO1Igz5S
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) March 4, 2026
“At the top of the briefing, you listed a long list of grievances against the Iranian government going back to the takeover of the embassy in ’79,” Feinberg began, listing a couple of examples. “But no one in this administration has laid out the imminent threat that was supposed to be taken care of by this … Why is it that you can’t say what the imminent threat against the U.S. was that required us to launch this?”
“I completely reject the premise of your question,” Leavitt replied. “You have had the President of the United States, the Secretary of War, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Vice President of the United States, the Secretary of State, and now I am out here today to explain to you exactly what led the president to make the decision to launch Operation Epic Fury.”
But Leavitt didn’t stop there. Instead, she went on to lay out, in more detail, some of the actions taken by the Iranian regime that had spurred President Trump to action, from their previous and ongoing support of terror proxies to their persistent attempts to create nuclear weapons that could eventually threaten the American people even at home.
“President Trump does not make these decisions in a vacuum. This decision to launch this operation was based on a cumulative effect of various direct threats that Iran posed to the United States of America, and the president’s feeling based on the fact that Iran does pose an imminent and direct threat to the United States of America,” she continued.
The press secretary took her explanation a step further, noting that Trump had only resorted to military action when it was abundantly clear that negotiations were going nowhere — and once he’d determined that Iran was likely to take action against the United States, he chose to strike first and prevent it from happening.
“The president found that through these extensive, exhaustive, failed negotiations with Iran that they were hell-bent on death and destruction,” she said. “So again, the president was not going to be just another president on a very long list who sat back, and stood by, and passed the buck of this direct threat to the next administration … Again, these decisions are not made in a vacuum. They are made by the president’s feeling that Iran was going to strike the United States and our assets in the region, and he was not going to sit back and watch that happen. The determination was made that the president was going to strike first alongside Israel, and that has obviously been proven to be the right decision and an effective one at that.”
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