CNN's Kaitlan Collins on Monday revisited a July remark from President Donald Trump that reads differently now that reporters know he wasn't on the plane with them.
On her program "The Source," Collins — who has pressed Trump on the Iran war before — replayed a gaggle from July 8, when Trump left a NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. The press pool had been told to lower their window shades before takeoff, an instruction Collins noted was unusual, and reporters pressed him on why.
"But it was when the president got back on this plane to fly home to the U.S., that he was asked by reporters why they had been told to lower their window shades on that first flight, which is extremely unusual and not typically something that happens for the press that sits on the right side of the plane, which is where that airport catering truck was now that you look back at that other video. But given what we know now, given the pictures that you can see now, it makes what the president told reporters in that gaggle afterward all the more noteworthy," she said.
Collins rolled a clip of a reporter asking why security officials had them close their window blinds. Trump gave a fumbling answer.
"Well, yeah, because uh you're, you know, probably on a dangerous plane because of the sleazebags that we have to deal with," he said, adding: "Well, I mean, if they ask you to close your windows, probably they'd feel that way. They didn't ask me to close mine, but if they did, I would have done it."
When asked whether Iran posed a credible threat to the aircraft, he said he faced danger constantly and told the traveling journalists, "But if I go, you go." He added that some of them might want to change professions.
The exchange gained new weight after The Washington Post reported that an Iranian assassination threat prompted an operation in which Trump flew secretly from Turkey on an alternate military aircraft while the White House said he was aboard Air Force One. Trump was taken off the older jet in an airport catering truck and flown out aboard a smaller Air Force C-32A, while journalists and some White House staff traveled on the decoy plane.
Post national security reporter Dan Lamothe, appearing on Collins's show, said the plane the press believed carried the president took the Air Force One call sign while Trump was elsewhere. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth boarded the C-32A separately, using external stairs, in an apparent bid to make the flight look routine.
The episode renewed questions about the newer Qatari-gifted jet's security, which the White House has defended.