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CNN anchor Laura Coates pulled no punches on Tuesday night as she highlighted Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s contradictory statements on Iran, playing remarks he made under oath during a Senate hearing earlier in the day alongside past boasts about the war.
“Epic Fury decimated Iran’s military and rendered it combat ineffective for years to come. Iran’s Navy is at the bottom of the sea,” Hegseth is shown saying on April 8th at a Pentagon presser under a CNN banner declaring, “Costly Contradictions.”
The right side of the screen then showed Hegseth telling senators, “They would try to impose their will on the waterways in ways that the world would not like. Call it a toll, call it a fee, call it an exchange, call it a control. They would do something that they would try to hold at issue.”
“Then you’ve got shrinking American munitions stockpiles. Last month, Hegseth was dismissing concerns, and it was even an issue. Today, it was a reason the military needs an urgent cash infusion,” Coates added, before playing a clip of Hegseth tussling with Face the Nation moderator Margaret Brennan on June 14:
Brennan: There is a crisis with those stockpiles right now in private industry.
Hegseth: That is a manufacturing story that the media wants to peddle. And ultimately, our stockpiles are great, and they only get stronger.
CNN then showed Hegseth declaring at the hearing, “We face critical shortfalls that threaten our ability to simply pay our service members, rapidly replenish equipment and munitions, and sustain vital operations without disruption.”
“But there is one question where Hegseth never seems to waver, and it’s this one: Who’s to blame for all of this?” Coates added.
“The disaster of what the Biden administration’s budgets gave us — it was not a priority to fund the Department of Defense under Joe Biden. It’s a neglect of the Biden administration. I mean, the Biden administration ignored hypersonics. I don’t know what Lloyd Austin did for four years. Again, that goes back to the Biden administration’s policy of divest to invest,” Hegseth declared in another clip from the hearing.
“Familiar names, titles missing, over and over. But not the one currently in the Oval Office who decided to engage in this war,” concluded Coates.
Coates’s segment mirrored much of the questioning from Senate Democrats who pressed Hegseth on how Iran was able to kill U.S. soldiers in recent missile strikes while President Donald Trump and Hegseth have repeatedly claimed Iran’s military capabilities have been decimated to next to nothing.
Watch the clip above via CNN.
The post CNN Demolishes Hegseth With Split Screen Showing His ‘Costly Contradictions’ on Iran War first appeared on Mediaite.
