Pete Hegseth gives press conference on Iran
Defense secretary Pete Hegseth and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff air force general Dan Caine are holding a press briefing at the Pentagon. I’ll bring you any news lines here.
Key events
Hegseth is now reading out various quotes from UN, IDF, CIA and Iranian figures suggesting that the nuclear sites were “severely damaged” and “effectively destroyed”, supposedly contrary to the DIA’s early findings.
Hegseth calls the UN “no friend to the United States, or certainly Israel often”.
Hegseth attacks the media for reporting on the “preliminary ***essment” by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), claiming “there’s low confidence in this particular report”.
This was preliminary and leaked because someone had an agenda to try to muddy the waters and make it look like this historic strike wasn’t successful.
By taking military action, Trump “created the conditions to end the war, decimating, obliterating Iran’s nuclear capabilities”, Hegseth says, contrary to early US intelligence findings reported yesterday that suggested US strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites only set program back by months.
Hegseth starts off by praising Trump’s “game-changing” and “historic” achievement in getting most of the Nato allies to raise the defense spending to 5%.
He attacks the media for “searching for scandals” instead of making a bigger deal of this.
Pete Hegseth gives press conference on Iran
Defense secretary Pete Hegseth and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff air force general Dan Caine are holding a press briefing at the Pentagon. I’ll bring you any news lines here.
Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday he would continue to work with US president Donald Trump to “defeat our common enemies, free our hostages, and quickly expand the circle of peace”.
Netanyahu posted the message with a picture of himself and Trump holding hands shortly after Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave his first speech since Iran and Israel reached a ceasefire.
Iran delivered ‘heavy slap to US’s face’, says Khamenei
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei claimed victory over Israel and said his country had “delivered a hand slap to America’s face” on Thursday, in his first public comments since a ceasefire was declared in the war between the two countries.
Khamenei spoke in a video broadcast on Iranian state television, his first appearance since June 19, looking and sounding more tired than he did only a week ago.
He told viewers that the US had only intervened in the war because “it felt that if it did not intervene, the Zionist regime would be utterly destroyed”.
But he said, however, that the US “achieved no gains from this war”.
“The Islamic Republic was victorious and, in retaliation, delivered a hand slap to America’s face,” he said, in apparent reference to an Iranian missile attack on an American base in Qatar on Monday, which caused no casualties.
A court in Costa Rica has ordered authorities to release foreign migrants who were locked up in a shelter after being deported by the US, according to a resolution issued on the eve of a visit by the US secretary of homeland security.
About 200 people from Afghanistan, Iran, Russia as well as from Africa and some other Asian countries, including 80 children, were brought to the Central American nation in February under an agreement with the US administration of Donald Trump, a move criticized by human rights organizations.
By partially accepting an appeal filed in March on behalf of the migrants, the constitutional chamber of the supreme court of justice gave immigration 15 days to process the “determination of the immigration status of the deportees” and their release, according to the resolution seen by AFP.
The migrants were detained in February at the Temporary Migrant Care center (CATEM), 360km (220 miles) south of San José, on the border with Panama.
However, in the face of criticism, the government allowed them to move freely outside the center in April.
Erdogan says Trump would join Ukraine peace talks in Turkey if Putin attends
Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan said his US counterpart Donald Trump told him he would attend potential peace talks between the leaders of Ukraine and Russia in Turkey, if Russian president Vladimir Putin also agreed to take part.
On his return flight from the Nato summit, where he met Trump for the first time since he returned to office, Erdogan said he told the US president Ankara aims to bring the Russian and Ukrainian leaders together in Turkey for peace talks.
“He (Trump) said, ‘if Russian president Vladimir Putin comes to Istanbul or Ankara for a solution, then I will also come,” Erdogan’s office on Thursday quoted him as telling reporters.
“We will hold the necessary contacts and God willing realise this meeting as soon as possible.”
The White House embraced the moniker of “daddy” for Donald Trump in a video that it released after Nato chief Mark Rutte used the term in a conversation with the US president.
“Daddy’s home,” the White House posted on X, along with the video featuring the song “Hey Daddy (Daddy’s Home)“ by Usher and images of Trump at the Nato summit in The Hague.
Rutte, the Dutch secretary general of the military alliance, used the word “daddy” in an appearance with Trump at Wednesday’s summit after the U.S. president berated Israel and Iran over violations of a ceasefire, which later appeared to be holding.
In response, Rutte laughed and said: “And then daddy has to sometimes use strong language to get (them to) stop.”
Robert Tait
The attorney general, Pam Bondi, professed ignorance of reports of immigration officials hiding their faces with masks during roundups of undo***ented people, despite widespread video evidence and reports that they are instilling pervasive fear and panic.
Challenged at a Wednesday Capitol Hill subcommittee hearing by Gary Peters, a Democratic senator for Michigan, Bondi, who as the country’s top law officer has a prominent role in the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policy, implied she was unaware of plain-clothed agents concealing their faces while carrying out arrests but suggested it was for self-protection.
“I do know they are being doxxed … they’re being threatened,” she told Peters. “Their families are being threatened.”
Bondi’s protestations appeared to strain credibility given the attention the masked raids carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents have attracted on social media and elsewhere.
Civil rights campaigners and democracy experts have criticised the raids as evocative of entrenched dictatorships and police states, and say it is a warning sign that the US is descending into authoritarianism.
Trump officials to give first cl***ified briefing to Congress on Iran strikes
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. My name is Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines.
Senators are set to meet with top national security officials Thursday as many question president Donald Trump’s decision to bomb three Iranian nuclear sites — and whether those strikes were ultimately successful.
The cl***ified briefing, which was originally scheduled for Tuesday and was delayed, also comes as the Senate is expected to vote this week on a resolution that would require congressional approval if Trump decides to strike Iran again, AP reported.
Democrats, and some Republicans, have said that the White House overstepped its authority when it failed to seek the advice of Congress and they want to know more about the intelligence that Trump relied on when he authorized the attacks.
“Senators deserve full transparency, and the administration has a legal obligation to inform Congress precisely about what is happening,” said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, who said Tuesday that it was “outrageous” that the Senate and House briefings were postponed. A similar briefing for House members was pushed to Friday.
CIA director John Ratcliffe, secretary of state Marco Rubio and defense secretary Pete Hegseth are expected to brief the senators on Thursday. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was scheduled to be at the Tuesday briefing, but will not be attending, according to a person familiar with the schedule.
In other news:
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Trump weighed in on Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York, saying Mamdani was a “100% Communist Lunatic” and saying he and other progressive politicians were signs that “our Country is really SCREWED”.
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Trump has lit into journalists who are reporting on the doubts in the intelligence community that the US bombs actually decimated the Iranian nuclear sites. He has called for a CNN journalist to be fired over her reporting. CNN defended its journalist, Natasha Bertrand, and its stories on the matter.
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Emil Bove, a judicial nominee and justice department official, was grilled by a Senate committee and denied allegations in a whistleblower report about ignoring judicial orders and said claims of a quid pro quo for New York City mayor Eric Adams were false.
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Speaking of Eric Adams, he is expected to formally announce his mayoral run tomorrow. He is running as an independent. And he went on Fox and called Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor, a “snake oil salesman”.
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Mamdani, meanwhile, gathered congratulations (sometimes muted) from prominent Democrats after his upset win in the mayoral primary. On the right, Stephen Miller has cast Mamdani’s win as a symptom of “unchecked migration”.
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The Working Families Party called Mamdani’s win a “seismic shift” and shows that “voters are thoroughly fed up with the status quo”.
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Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s new vaccine advisory panel is meeting today for the first time.
