WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump told a crowd in Arizona on Wednesday that government workers who leak to the press “should be shot,” then pointed at the reporters covering his rally and said they were “almost as bad.”
“Leakers should be, in my opinion, leakers should be shot,” Trump said at a campaign event for Rep. Andy Biggs, the Republican nominee for governor, in Bullhead City, less than three weeks before Election Day. He tied the remark to a planned raid on Iran that he said he had to call off after someone “leaked the time we were leaving, the time we were arriving.”
In the remarks NBC quoted, he did not say who the leaker was or whether anyone had been identified. “Somebody leaked, some sleazebag. They ought to go to jail or be shot,” he said, adding that for the rest of their lives they “should be in jail.” He called leakers “the scum of the Earth.”
Then he turned to the press section. “Those same people up there, they’re almost as bad as a leaker, because they leak,” Trump said. “Oh, they leak false information. That makes them a leaker, right?”
NBC News reported that Trump appeared to be describing the June 2025 U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, which went ahead despite the leak he described. NBC’s account carries no White House comment on whether the president meant his remark literally.
The line lands on a record that has been moving in one direction. NBC listed proposals to have “new and existing employees” sign nondisclosure agreements, a January search of the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson in an investigation of a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified material, and a June attempt to compel grand jury testimony from four journalists. The Natanson search ran into a federal magistrate judge, who ruled within a month that the administration could not examine the seized data. A district judge upheld that ruling, and the administration has made no further appeal. The grand jury subpoenas were dropped after newspapers pushed back.
It is also the latest chapter in what TEH has reported as the White House’s press freedom crackdown, and it came days after the Justice Department’s investigation of TV networks over pool coverage.
The president has called the news media the “true Enemy of the People.” In the remarks NBC quoted, he did not say who would do the shooting.
