White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is demanding the correction of a report warning of a potentially imminent Iranian attack on California.
ABC News reported on Wednesday that Iran wanted to use drones to attack California if it were ever hit by US military strikes.
The bulletin went out in an FBI alert last month to its Joint Terrorism Task Force members.
‘Iran allegedly aspired to conduct a surprise attack using unmanned aerial vehicles from an unidentified vessel off the coast of the United State homeland, specifically against unspecified targets in California, in the event that the US conducted strikes against Iran,’ an FBI alert obtained by ABC News said.
The report prompted a rush of concerning headlines about California facing a wartime threat, but neither the White House nor the FBI responded at the time.
Now, the administration has broken its silence, and Leavitt is calling on ABC News to retract its report after she claims the reporters left out a critical detail.
‘This post and story should be immediately retracted by ABC News for providing false information to intentionally alarm the American people,’ Leavitt posted on social media on Thursday.
‘They wrote this based on one email that was sent to local law enforcement in California about a single, unverified tip,’ she added. ‘The email even states the tip was based on *unverified* intelligence.’
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called on ABC News to retract a story about California facing a potential Iranian drone threat
Leavitt noted how the FBI bulletin referenced in the story said it was based on ‘unverified intelligence,’ a disclaimer left out of the ABC News story
Iran has shown off a sprawling underground network of tunnels filled with row after row of drones and rockets
‘Yet ABC News left out this critical fact in their story! WHY? TO BE CLEAR: No such threat from Iran to our homeland exists, and it never did.’
The ABC News report cited an FBI alert to California law enforcement warning of the Iranian drone threat.
However, the outlet omitted a portion of the FBI bulletin that claimed the intelligence behind the Iranian California drone plot was ‘unverified.’
‘We recently acquired unverified information that as of early February 2026, Iran allegedly aspired to conduct a surprise attack using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) from an unidentified vessel off the coast of the United States homeland,’ the bulletin begins, according to a screenshot published by the FBI.
‘You will notice the word left out —“Unverified”‘ FBI Spokesman Ben Williamson wrote in response to the report.
The original notice also says in bright red letters that the content of the FBI bulletin is ‘raw’ information that is subject to revision and that the revelations are not meant for the public or the press.
California officials were quick to downplay the urgency of the report on Wednesday.
‘It’s all-around intelligence collecting, and it’s all about a posture of preparedness for the worst-case scenario,’ Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom told reporters on Wednesday.
File photo of the Hollywood sign in California
‘Again, it’s not a surprise, and it’s sort of a large part of the larger spectrum of considerations that we have as it relates to doing what we can to support our federal partners and local partners at the state level, in terms of what could happen next,’ the governor said.
The alert surfaced as the Trump administration continued its sustained offensive against Iran. This move follows a pattern of escalation in the Middle East, where the regime in Tehran has used drone warfare as a primary tool for retaliation.
The Iranian-made Shahed-136 has been one of the most capable and battle-tested one-way kamikaze drones. It has been used by Iran to attack Israel and the Gulf nations, and by Russia in its invasion of Ukraine.
Shaheds cost roughly $20,000 – $50,000, depending on the variant, making them cheap to produce when compared to the multi-million-dollar interceptor missiles the US uses to shoot the Iranian drones down.
