The Air Force One ruse
The Washington Post’s spectacular scoop about President Trump secretly switching planes due to an Iranian assassination threat is intriguing on so many levels.
And it’s bound to further intensify the fight about government leaks that undermine Trump’s claims and inform the public.
“Contradicting public statements, Trump took secret flight from Turkey amid Iranian threat” is the Post’s homepage headline right now. If you haven’t read it yet, here’s a gift link.
The initial tip about the secret flight “came to the Post in part because individuals thought that there was a hole in public understanding here that needed to be clarified,” Post reporter Dan Lamothe said on “The Source with Kaitlan Collins” last night.
Lamothe bylined the story along with John Hudson, Andrew Ba Tran and Joyce Sohyun Lee. He said it was “not an easy story to confirm,” adding, it “obviously took some time since that event to put this all together.”
The New York Times may have been on to the story, too, because Maggie Haberman, Eric Schmitt and Zolan Kanno-Youngs published a story matching the Post within an hour and a half.
They noted that the Iranian threat “led the White House to purposely mislead reporters assigned to cover Mr. Trump, leaving journalists to report that he was traveling on board a plane that was being used as a decoy.”
“In other words,” HuffPost White House correspondent S.V. Dáte wrote on X, “everyone aboard the real 747 AF1 — crew, guests, press pool — was considered expendable.”
Let’s revisit that early July timeline in light of what we now know…
Trump first alluded to the threat on July 8 by announcing that he wouldn’t fly out of Turkey on the new Qatari-gifted Air Force One plane that he arrived on. Instead, he said, the plane was being sent ahead to Mildenhall Air Force Base in the UK to give servicemembers “a chance to tour the aircraft.”
That pretext fell apart when news outlets reported on the security concerns that really led to the plane switch. The reports enraged Trump and triggered an intense leak investigation inside the government, resulting in subpoenas to several New York Times reporters. The Times fought back and won. It later published an investigation showing that Trump’s eagerness to start flying on the new plane “led to ballooning costs and trade-offs in safety features.”
So the truth eventually got out — even more so in the past 12 hours. Trump’s deception has been laid bare.
Minutes after sneaking back onto the plane that reporters thought he flew from Turkey to the UK, Trump was asked by a member of the press pool, “You’re saying there wasn’t a security concern?” Trump replied, “No, no. Why would there be?”
Perhaps Trump and his aides would justify that lie now as part of the elaborate ruse that was undertaken to protect him.
But as LawDork’s Chris Geidner wrote overnight, this is “also a story about the way the Trump administration lies to the public and to the press, as well as how senior administration officials — up to and including Trump — might have been willing to go so far as to put the lives of others, including members of the media, at risk.”
Geidner says the subpoenas issued to the NYT should be re-examined in light of this new information.
Thought bubble: Were the leak hunts partly an effort to cover up the plane ruse?
For more on the tick-tock of it all, Kevin Liptak, Alejandra Jaramillo and Donald Judd’s CNN story has new detail about what happened at Mildenhall and how it deviated from the norm.
>> The truth about the secret plane was pieced together partly through White House pool photos and videos, as well as plane tracker accounts and other open source data sets.
>> Given all that The Washington Post has been through in the past few years, big scoops are even more meaningful. The Post’s rivals are praising the plane story: “Every day the @washingtonpost still has some story that its competition wishes we had,” the NYT’s Peter Baker wrote on X. “As awful as the cuts have been, those left at the paper remain some of the best in the business.”
>> This story on the NYT homepage paired perfectly with the breaking news last night: “Trump Wants to Move On From the Middle East. It’s Not Letting Him.”
“Together, there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal,” Trump said yesterday of the MMR combination shot, contradicting his own CDC, which states on its website that “the MMR vaccine is very safe.”
Trump’s irresponsible remarks aired live on Fox News and other right-wing outlets, and so far Fox has not aired any fact-check or (better yet) debunking.
ABC’s Steven Portnoy deserves credit for following up during the Oval Office Q&A and saying, “I think I heard you say the MMR vaccine is quite lethal. Is there any evidence of that?” “No,” Trump said, “what I’ve heard is that there are, there are some people that say it is that way… I’ve heard when you put them together, they can be explosive.”
“Whoever those ‘some people’ are, they are not medical authorities,” CNN’s Daniel Dale wrote in this detailed fact-check overnight.
On “OutFront,” Erin Burnett debunked another Trump lie — that “I’ve seen proof” that “they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body” – by holding up a soda bottle and a syringe on screen. Here’s the video.
Overnight, Puck’s Matt Belloni broke the story that will drive the day’s conversation in Hollywood and across the media world: Paramount CEO David Ellison has told his senior leadership team that he intends to move Paramount out of California if the antitrust lawsuit led by California AG Rob Bonta is not settled by October 1.
Ellison went into specifics about how the move would happen, indicating it “would be the only reasonable way to shoulder the additional costs of defending against” the state AGs’ case. The leadership team meeting apparently leaked because several attendees “were upset” afterward “and told colleagues about it,” Belloni wrote.
Belloni acknowledged upfront that “it’s hard to gauge the seriousness” of the threat, “given that it’s one of the few levers he can pull” in the battle with Bonta. The AG’s office responded by calling it “another attempt to blackmail the state into letting an illegal deal through. Paramount has lost the plot as it continues to lose in court.”
A Paramount spokesperson declined my request for comment this morning.
Yesterday, Bonta rebutted Ellison’s NYT op-ed with a guest column in Deadline. Bonta wrote, “Paramount and Warner Bros are spearheading a public relations campaign to spin a narrative that is simply false. They would have you believe that this is purely politics. It’s not.” Instead, the state AG lawsuit is a “cut and dry” antitrust enforcement case, he wrote, concluding, “And we intend to win.”
While Mark Zuckerberg’s lengthy AI essay is making news — TechCrunch says the “AI manifesto is exactly why people don’t like AI” — his company is facing uphill battles in court. Yesterday, a US appeals court “allowed thousands of lawsuits to move forward against Meta, Alphabet’s Google, ByteDance’s TikTok, and other social media companies over claims they designed their products to be addictive to young users,” Reuters’ Diana Novak Jones reports.
In another setback for Meta, the company lost a last-minute bid to pause “a landmark trial slated to begin this week involving claims from dozens of state attorneys general alleging the social media giant addicts children and has caused a youth mental health crisis,” Bloomberg’s Isaiah Poritz writes.
That aforementioned appeals court dismissed Meta’s early appeal. Jury selection is supposed to start on Wednesday. (The Tennessee trial I mentioned yesterday is a separate case against Meta.)
Trump “just won permission to file a new, narrower complaint against the BBC in his defamation lawsuit against the British broadcaster,” MS NOW’s Jordan Rubin reports. US District Judge Roy Altman, a Trump appointee, granted Trump this “despite the BBC’s opposition argument that doing so would reward the president’s ‘gamesmanship’ in this litigation.”
Remember: Last week, Altman granted Trump a reprieve from the court order requiring him to turn over his financial records to the BBC while the judge considered whether Trump can refile. Trump originally wrote that the BBC’s brief bad edit had damaged his businesses, and now he’ll remove that from an amended complaint so as not to open his books…
Republicans in Florida are trying something new to pressure the NYT. “Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, representing the state’s pension fund, is demanding under threat of lawsuit that New York Times directors divulge six years’ worth of records to prove the company is running smoothly and Florida assets aren’t at risk,” the Miami Herald’s Liv Caputo reports.
The NYT says the demand letter is “positioned as a request under corporate law” but is a “clear attempt to chill First Amendment-protected journalism.” Caputo has the full story here…
Hundreds of employees from across USA Today Co. “are calling on the company to dissolve its recently announced partnership with Palantir,” NiemanLab’s Hanaa’ Tameez reports.
In a joint statement, 31 unionized newsrooms alleged the deal “threatens to undermine trust in our news outlets and raises serious questions about the data security of our readers.”
>> Aspiring creators “will have to meet higher thresholds to begin earning money from ads and subscriptions” on YouTube starting Feb. 1 as the platform seeks to “keep pace with the growth of YouTube,” Aisha Malik writes. (TechCrunch)
>> X’s ad business brought in $367 million during Q2 2026, down from $1.08 billion in Q2 2022 before Elon Musk took over, meaning Musk “has wiped out two-thirds of Twitter’s ad business over the exact period in which he promised investors he’d nearly triple it,” Mike Masnick reports. (Techdirt)
>> Trump Media & Technology Group “posted another large net loss for the second quarter of 2026,” Todd Spangler writes. (Variety)
Danny Boyle’s Rupert Murdoch movie, titled “Ink,” will “open in select theaters Dec. 11 before landing on Netflix on Jan. 8 in the U.S. and Latin America,” Variety’s Clayton Davis reports.
Before then, it will be the opening night selection of the Venice Film Festival next month. Here’s the first image of Guy Pearce playing Rupert…
This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.