Fox News White House Correspondent Peter Doocy made headlines when he asked President Donald Trump if he was surprised that he was reportedly not briefed ahead of time about Iran retaliating against the Gulf states.
“You were talking about Iran a couple of times today and what they did after Epic Fury began. You said they hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked. Are you surprised that nobody briefed you ahead of time that that might be their retaliation?” Doocy asked the president in the Oval Office.
“Nobody — nobody. No, no, no. No, the greatest experts — nobody thought they were going to hit. They were, I wouldn’t say friendly countries. They were, like, neutral. They were — they lived with them for years. Peter, they were going to take over the Middle East. They were going to knock out Israel with their nuclear weapons,” Trump began.
“But after we knocked out their nuclear potential, their nuclear potential weapon, they started building missiles, thousands and thousands of missiles, and they were going to do it with missiles while they developed. These are sick people. While they developed nuclear, somehow they were going to start at a different site because that site was, you saw the site, the mountain, they were going to go into a certain area, which we know exactly where it is, and they were going to do that,” Trump continued.
“You know, if I didn’t terminate Barack Hussein Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, you would right now — well, Israel would be gone. It would be incinerated, and probably the Middle East likewise. And remember, they have all of those missiles and I heard they were sending missiles to UAE. You know, UAE is like the banker for Iran. They’re, like, the banker. Qatar, their neighbors, they got along OK. Saudi Arabia — all of a sudden, Kuwait, Kuwait is getting hit. Bahrain is getting hit. All these countries are getting hit,” Trump added.
“It’s not a question of like, gee, should you have known? And if we did know, big deal. I mean, we have to do what we have to do. But we hit them so hard, like nobody’s ever been hit. We hit them very hard. And we’ve extinguished most of their missiles. We’ve extinguished most of their drones. We’ve extinguished most of the places where the missiles and the drones are built. We’ve fully extinguished two layers of leadership, and probably a third, if you believe some stories,” the president argued.
“We’ve taken out their entire navy, we’ve taken out every one of their — they call it a drone layer, a mine layer. There’s specific boats that are meant to put mines on — how would you like to have a nation that has 22 boats where their sole function, they’re very different looking boats. You wouldn’t want one for your family. They’re not pretty. Their sole function is to lift a mine into the water and drop it a certain number of feet down. But they had 22 of them. We’ve taken out all of them. But you can probably — you can probably drop them off on the bus. So we don’t even know. By the way, we don’t know that any mines have even been dropped. But the thought that they would scares people that have billion-dollar ships,” Trump concluded.
WATCH:
Vice President JD Vance was expected to board a plane and lead a U.S. negotiating team in talks in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, but was unexpectedly called back to the White House on Tuesday amid uncertainty over Iran’s participation.
Vance flew to Pakistan earlier this month to lead talks in Islamabad along with special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner. The VP said the Iranians refused to agree to the main point the Americans were seeking — an “affirmative commitment” the country will not pursue nuclear weapons.
The meeting did not yield a deal.
On Tuesday night, the U.S., Israel, and Iran extended the ceasefire once more.
