A staunch advocate for veterans mocked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Iran briefing, saying the Trump administration official appeared “rattled” and “volatile” while updating reporters on the strikes on Iranian nuclear sites.
Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq war veteran and founder of the veteran advocacy nonprofit Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, berated Hegseth during a discussion on CNN Thursday night.
“To use a military term, it’s conduct unbecoming. He looks rattled, he obviously looks thin-skinned, he’s extremely aggressive and volatile, and he’s attacking the press. We need him to attack our enemies,” Reickhoff said.
“I wish he attacked Vladimir Putin as aggressively as he attacks CNN and others,” he continued.
Rieckhoff’s comments come after CNN published a report claiming that the Pentagon’s own initial report suggested that the Iran strikes had only damaged the sites, not completely destroying them like the president has suggested. The White House railed against the report, calling it “flat-out wrong.”
During the briefing, Hegseth lashed out at Fox News correspondent Jennifer Griffin, a former colleague of his, during the Thursday Iran briefing after she questioned if the Trump administration was certain that Iran’s highly enriched uranium had been hit in the strikes.
“Jennifer, you’ve been about the worst. The one who misrepresents the most intentionally,” Hegseth said.
“I think what he’s doing is continuing to conflate the war with the warriors. It’s something we worked hard as a nation across partisan lines to separate after Vietnam, to separate the politics from the people, and they have melded the two together,” Rieckhoff explained.
“Because the press is asking hard questions of our president, doesn’t mean anything about the troops. It’s entirely separate, and they’re using it consistently as a very dangerous shield which continues to politicize our military, which is their playbook now, which is very, very dangerous,” he continued.
Attacks on the press have been consistent across various aspects of President Donald Trump’s administration. Trump himself has berated specific journalists for their reporting and has branded certain outlets as “fake news.”
Originally published on Latin Times
