Karoline Leavitt demands retraction of ABC News story claiming FBI warned Iran could attack California
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt demanded Thursday that ABC News retract a story claiming that the FBI has officially warned Iran may try to attack California with drones.
ABC News posted on Wednesday, "BREAKING: The FBI has warned police departments in California that Iran wants to retaliate for American attacks by launching offensive drones against the West Coast, according to an alert reviewed by @ABC News."
Leavitt blasted the post, writing, "This post and story should be immediately retracted by ABC News for providing false information to intentionally alarm the American people."
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She added further, "They wrote this based on one email that was sent to local law enforcement in California about a single, unverified tip. The email even states the tip was based on *unverified* intelligence. Yet ABC News left out this critical fact in their story! WHY?"
"TO BE CLEAR: No such threat from Iran to our homeland exists, and it never did," she wrote.
She followed up by retweeting a post with side-by-side screenshots of the story ABC wrote and the FBI alert actually sent out. The post from Assistant Director for Public Affairs at the FBI Ben Williamson read, "On the left is the way ABC (or their source) reported the FBI alert. On the right is the actual FBI alert that went to JTFF partners. You will notice the word left out —'Unverified.’"
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ABC News has since updated its story with an editor's note declaring, "The FBI has posted a fuller version of its alert to California authorities, which includes that the information was unverified. The latest version of this story has been updated with the full statement."
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Asked about the unverified report in the alert, President Donald Trump said Wednesday, "It's being investigated. But you have a lot of things happening, and all we can do is take them as they come, and the war itself is being prosecuted as well as anybody has ever seen."