CNN host Dana Bash said Friday on “The Situation Room” that during a phone conversation, President Donald Trump said the hardline negotiators he was dealing with in Iran were killed in Israel’s military strike.
Bash said, “Well, my first question, it was a very brief conversation, but my first question was about the secretary of state’s remarks last night. His statement, which you mentioned in the open to the show, which explicitly said that the U.S. was notified about the Israeli strikes shortly before they happened, certainly warned Iran not to retaliate against U.S. assets. But the boilerplate language that you and I have seen for so many years that any U.S. administration puts in, which is the U.S., supports Israel’s right to defend itself. The U.S. supports Israel’s action that was absent from that statement.”
She added, “So that’s how I began my my discussion with the president. I said, does what does this mean about the support for what Israel has done and support for Israel? He jumped in and said, we, of course support Israel, obviously, and supported it like no one has ever supported it. It was a very successful attack. Iran should have listened to me when I said, you know, I gave them. I don’t know if you know, but I gave them a 60 day warning and today is day 61. He went on to say they should now come to the table to make a deal before it’s too late. It will be too late for them, you know, the people I was dealing with are dead, the hard liners. And I said, so Israel got them? And he said, well, they were the hard liners and I’ll just say, yes, they’re dead. And then I said, just to put a fine point on it, they are were killed in last night’s attack? And he said very sarcastically, yeah, they didn’t die of the flu. They didn’t die of Covid.”
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