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President Trump confirmed this week that U.S. authorities are actively monitoring Iranian sleeper cells believed to have entered the country during the Biden administration’s open-border years, and within hours his White House press secretary caught ABC News red-handed peddling an unverified intelligence tip as a confirmed FBI warning. The twin developments paint a picture that should alarm every American: the threat from Iran is real, it is here, and the legacy media cannot be trusted to report it honestly.
Trump made the remarks Wednesday in response to a question from Fox News’ Peter Doocy about whether he had been briefed on Iranian networks operating inside the United States. “I have been, and a lot of people came in through Biden with his stupid open border,” the president said bluntly. “But we know where most of them are. We’ve got our eye on all of them.” There was no hedging, no diplomatic softening. Trump laid it out plainly — hostile foreign operatives entered this country on the previous administration’s watch, and now his team is tracking them. That is the reality of what four years of deliberate border negligence produced, and no amount of media spin can undo the damage already done.
The Iranian threat is not hypothetical. On the same day Trump issued his warning, a gunman attacked Temple Israel synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, ramming a vehicle through the doors and engaging armed security in a firefight. While authorities have not publicly confirmed an Iranian connection to that specific attack, the timing underscores just how volatile the domestic threat environment has become. Across the border in Canada, Conservative lawmakers are sounding alarms of their own, accusing the Liberal government of allowing hundreds of Iranian regime-linked operatives to remain in the country despite canceled visas. Deputy Conservative leader Melissa Lantsman and her colleagues revealed that of 239 individuals whose visas were revoked, only one has actually been deported. One. The rest remain on Canadian soil, filing asylum claims and hiding behind legal loopholes while the Iranian regime’s shadow network grows.
Exiled Iranian journalist Mehdi Ghadimi told Fox News Digital that regime-linked individuals arrive in Western countries through multiple channels — as students, academics, investors — but often maintain ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “If someone is moving large amounts of money out of Iran and investing abroad, it is very difficult to do that without the approval of the IRGC and the security institutions of the Islamic Republic,” Ghadimi said. The disappearance of Iranian dissident Masood Masjoody in British Columbia earlier this year, now being investigated as a likely murder, has only deepened fears within the diaspora community that Tehran’s long arm reaches well into North America.
While the president was being straightforward about the threat, ABC News was doing what the legacy media does best — manufacturing panic for clicks while burying critical context. On Wednesday, ABC posted what it called a breaking story claiming the FBI had warned California police departments that Iran wanted to launch offensive drones against the West Coast. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tore into the report, demanding an immediate retraction. “This post and story should be immediately retracted by ABC News for providing false information to intentionally alarm the American people,” Leavitt wrote. She explained that ABC based its breathless headline on a single email sent to local law enforcement about an unverified tip — and that ABC deliberately omitted the word “unverified” from its reporting.
The FBI’s own Assistant Director for Public Affairs, Ben Williamson, posted side-by-side screenshots proving the point. On one side, the ABC News version of events. On the other, the actual FBI alert, which clearly labeled the intelligence as unverified. “You will notice the word left out — ‘Unverified,'” Williamson wrote. ABC was eventually forced to update its story with an editor’s note acknowledging the fuller version of the alert, but the damage was already done. Millions of Americans saw the original headline. The correction will reach a fraction of them. That is not journalism — it is information warfare waged against the public by people who are supposed to inform them. Does anyone still wonder why trust in the media has cratered to historic lows?
Leavitt’s rebuttal was unequivocal: “TO BE CLEAR: No such threat from Iran to our homeland exists, and it never did.” That is an important distinction. The administration is not downplaying the Iranian threat — Trump himself acknowledged sleeper cells and surveillance operations that same day. What the White House is saying is that the specific drone-attack-on-California narrative was based on raw, unverified intelligence that ABC inflated into a national scare story. There is a world of difference between acknowledging that Iranian operatives are being tracked on American soil and claiming that drone strikes on the West Coast are imminent. One is responsible transparency. The other is reckless fearmongering from a network that has already paid hundreds of millions in defamation settlements and apparently learned nothing from it.
The Department of Homeland Security remains unfunded as congressional Democrats continue to block spending bills, even as the threat landscape intensifies. Iranian-backed proxies are active in the Middle East, the Strait of Hormuz crisis continues to rattle global energy markets, and the FBI is investigating multiple potential terror attacks on American soil in a single day. This is not the time for media outlets to play games with unverified intelligence for the sake of a splashy headline. It is the time for sober, accurate reporting — and for a government that takes border security and domestic counterterrorism as seriously as this one claims to. The Trump administration appears to be doing its part. The question is whether the institutions around it — the courts, the media, the opposition party — will stop actively making the job harder.
If ABC News knowingly stripped the word “unverified” from an FBI alert to generate a scarier headline, what other critical context are they leaving out of the stories you read every day?
Providence watches over the bold.
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