Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

It's a strange story certainly this Air Force One business, though the Trump administration does manufacture plenty of strange storylines.

It's also a deadly serious story, one that raises questions not only about the dubious decision-making that led to this Air Force One caper, but about Iran's continued ability to wreak havoc on the US and its friends months after the president promised that the threat of the Islamic Republic would be neutralized.

Iran is a shadow over the White House and over the Republican party.

Something that could help the Republicans out of their predicament, the Democratic Socialists of America.

I'll discuss this tonight with my guests, Elizabeth Biller, writer at large at the New York Times.

Adam Harris is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a co-host of the Radio Atlantic podcast.

Dan Lamoth is a national security reporter for the Washington Post.

And Liz Landers is the White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour.

Thank you, Liz, for doing double duty tonight.

We appreciate it.

Dan, let's start with you.

You broke the story.

Explain what happened on Air Force One and why it happened.

Uh yeah, thank you for having me.

Um just an extraordinary tip that uh I I received and you know, just running it down.

I mean, the idea that President Trump leaving a NATO summit with the, you know, the the the world's eyes on him um moves tells the world that he's sending his new plane back to Britain, tells the world he's taking the old Air Force One instead.

The new plane being the one given to him by cutter.

Yes.

Yes.

only to learn that he took neither of those planes and in fact moved by catering truck secretly to the third smaller plane, the C-32, without telling anyone and then not telling anyone for the next calendar month uh until we reported that story out.

Yeah.

And why do they say they did it and who knew and who didn't know?

Yeah.

So, I mean obviously there is legitimate concerns about the president's life.

The Iran has made efforts in the past.

They received a tip from Israel uh saying that they thought the president's life was in danger uh that there could have been a threat on him or the aircraft.

Uh so that threat was assessed later to be not high confidence, but in the moment without a lot of time to act, uh they chose to put this all in motion.

Right.

Um Liz, not unusual to protect the president.

obviously a a a a worthy cause.

Not telling the people who got on Air Force One, right, that the that they believe they had intelligence or the suspicion that that Air Force One was going to be targeted.

That's the truly unusual aspect of this story, right?

There were White House staffers aboard the plane that was apparently what was going to be targeted.

Also, Secret Service.

There also military officers on board that plane too and press as well.

And I think as a reporter when you travel with the president, you have an expectation that he is a target at any given time.

But for the the actual circumstances to be so real that the president is then moved off the plane, I don't think that that's something that uh most White House press are thinking about when they're traveling with him.

And in fact, the White House Correspondents Association, this was reported by a number of media outlets, has apparently sat down with the White House press shop to have a conversation about the future of keeping the press corps that travels with the president safe and informed of where he is.

What would be the normal way of doing this?

Decoys are not uncommon, but but typically it's a short duration thing where from the outside world, you wouldn't necessarily be sure which plane he was on, right?

You know, a common example when you watch the Marine Corps helicopters roll in with the president.

They usually come in groups of three.

From the ground, you can't really tell which one and then at some point it becomes apparent, right?

uh when they've done this overseas in the past, you know, one example that came up a lot this week was President Clinton in 2000 landing in Pakistan.

That was immediately apparent once he stepped out of the other aircraft and there was at least some uh amount of White House staffers and and certainly uh a member of the White House press corps who had been briefed in advance, hey, we need to do this here.

Why?

In this case, no one knew outside of a very select amount uh of senior White House staff, Secret Service, and it was just kept quiet really from then on.

Right.

Elizabeth, you've supervised coverage of many White Houses.

You've covered many White Houses.

What strikes you about this as as what's the larger meaning of this very strange episode?

just the way the um the pe the the civilians on the plane were were sacrificial were potential sacrificial lambs and that they were so unaware of it.

Our colleague Peter Baker wrote a great story this week about it.

quoted Andrew Marlo who was the screenwriter for Air Force One the 1997 thriller starring Harrison Ford and it the president's plane is hijacked and Marlo told Peter that you know I don't think I could have written that as a you know movies are not real life but I don't think I could have written that into a movie because you want the the president to be heroic and that kind of action would not be perceived he felt by by an audience as a heroic action.

So that was that was interesting and I I would have I would not have liked to have been on that plane and not not been aware of the risk that I was taking.

If you were member of the press corps, you would have gone on the plane had you known or would you have said, "Wait a second.

What's going on here?"

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't think I would have I would have thought long and hard about it.

Right.

Right.

What about you, Adam?

Just say yes.

Be heroic.

I'll have to say yes.

I'll sacrifice.

I'll sacrifice.

But it is there's the having the knowledge of it as opposed to sort of being left in the dark about it.

Um you're able to make an informed decision.

Right.

Right.

And they were sort of told to close their window shades as opposed to actually even having the ability to know.

Dan, the real story here is transparency.

If you did not find this out, we would not be talking about this.

It's it's very odd to to to to see this story just emerge a month later.

Um, you've been dealing with the administration for for some time.

Is this what you have come to expect in terms of transparency and accountability?

Short answer is yes.

I mean, who knows how many things we don't know.

Um, I would say when this tip was brought to me, initially it sounded pretty surreal even for kind of current events.

Uh, so it took a lot to kind of grow the confidence that hey, we really had this right.

And the fact that we initially got a straight no comment and then the statement that kind of half explained it was like we got this.

Let's go.

Right.

Right.

The the the larger context of this is Iran and its shadow over American foreign policy over this administration even over the midterms which we'll get to in a second.

I want you to listen, Elizabeth, to something that the uh president just said earlier today to get a sense of how he's ostensibly seeing this war.

Why don't we just listen?

Pretty soon, I'll be declaring the Hormo Strait, a territory of the United States.

Essentially, that's what we have the blockade.

No ships get through unless we want them to.

So, this comes after the president said that his new approach to Iran, this week's new approach would be to low-key it.

Not not entirely clear what that means.

It's been a while, 6 months.

6 months.

Um, the straight from was open before the war.

Um, now he's talking about owning it.

Give us your sense right now of where this where this war is.

It seems as if the White House is desperate to tell the American people and the American voter, we won, you don't have to think about Iran anymore, and we're not going to think about Iran anymore.

Is that fair?

Uh, no.

Because I think that Iran um uh it, you know, I I again, this is a little premature, but it reminds me of Jimmy Carter.

I think Iran wants this to keep going um certainly through the midterms and potentially into uh 2028.

I mean right now I think what we we've been seeing the last six months I think we'll see more of that Trump makes some statement there seems to be some movement towards um negotiations uh the stock market goes up you know and then and then the Iranians say we're not negotiating there's there's exchange of fire and we're back at it that's what has been going on for six months I don't see how this changes and I don't I think Trump must have been trolling people when he said that he was going to uh annex the straight of hormuz uh that's yeah I couldn't tell if he was joking or or coming to a coming to a spontaneous policy realization.

Yeah.

I mean, you you never really necessarily know with him, but what what you've seen from the administration in the last week, you have um Scott Bessent saying that, you know, they're going to have economic sanctions unlike anything that we've seen before.

You have Pete Hexith saying that the they're they can keep the blockade going sort of indefinitely.

Um, so they're trying to project this confidence, but at the same time, you have Republicans on Capitol Hill saying that, well, the enemy gets a vote too in when this war is over and when they say they're they're done with the fighting.

And I think that that is really starting to weigh on the administration, which has continuously tried to project confidence over the last 6 months, even as it's been quite clear that their control and um or lack thereof uh is uh the sort of central factor in this.

Dan, you're an expert on these sorts of things.

What are the chances that the blockade achieves Trump's goals?

I mean, the Navy is a powerful navy possible.

I mean, the block the blockade is causing pain.

I mean, that there there's a fair amount of reporting out there to that extent.

But I think the blockade also comes with an opportunity cost.

The longer you do this, the more strain you put on the US Navy, the sailors, the ships, uh you know, the fact that you have nowhere to take a quick port stop, which which is is a problem for both the delivery of food, any kind of repairs.

There's nothing easy about doing this blockade long term.