A secret detour off Air Force One has turned into a fight over what the government owes the people who cover it. John Brennan, who ran the CIA under President Obama, says the Trump White House crossed a line by letting journalists board a jet without telling them a threat had already reshaped the flight plan.
Brennan told MS Now on Tuesday that past administrations he served would not have sent staff and a planeload of press into the air without first confirming the danger had been contained. He described the obligation in blunt terms, calling it an ethical requirement rather than a courtesy. The remark landed days after The Washington Post first reported the maneuver that sent President Trump out of Turkey on a plane no one in the press cabin knew he was on.
A catering truck hid the president’s real route out of Ankara
The switch happened on July 8, after the NATO summit in Ankara wrapped up. Trump announced he would fly the older Air Force One to the United Kingdom, the plane he once flew for old times’ sake. Meanwhile, the newer Qatari-gifted jet made its own trip so troops stationed there could see it.
He boarded the older plane in view of television cameras. What the cameras did not show, according to CBS News and later confirmed by CNN, was that Trump left minutes later inside a catering truck positioned to block the view. He then boarded a smaller Air Force C-32A for the actual flight to Britain.
Staff and journalists stayed on the original aircraft, believing the president was still with them. NBC News reported the Secret Service pushed for the switch after learning the retrofitted Qatari plane lacked the secure communications and defensive systems built into the decades-old jet it replaced.
Reporters were told only to lower their shades
Once airborne, a Secret Service agent walked into the press cabin and asked the traveling media to keep their window shades closed, a detail multiple outlets captured in pool notes filed that day. No explanation accompanied the instruction. When a photographer tried to lift a shade, the agent asked again that it stay down.
Trump addressed the switch days later while flying home on the Qatari jet. He told a reporter the flight carried extra risk because of the “sleaze bags” the administration has to deal with. He then added that he sits atop Iran’s target list, ahead of the reporter.
The comment was the closest the president came to acknowledging a threat had shaped the trip, even as the White House had not yet disclosed the plane switch itself.
Congress says intelligence committees were left in the dark
The secrecy extended past the press pool. Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said afterward, “we were not briefed.” He said no threat reporting specific to that night had reached his panel, despite months of intelligence chatter tied to Iran.
A spokesperson for Sen. Mark Warner, his Senate counterpart, said Warner had not been briefed either. Both lawmakers have asked the administration for an immediate accounting. They want to know what intelligence triggered the switch. They also want to know why oversight committees learned about it through news coverage rather than a briefing.
The Wall Street Journal later reported that Israeli intelligence had flagged a specific threat involving shoulder-fired missiles aimed at Air Force One. The report raised the stakes around a maneuver the White House has not fully explained publicly.
History offers a precedent with a different outcome
Presidents have used decoy flights before, but Tuesday’s Washington Post reporting on a nearly identical 2000 episode involving Bill Clinton in Pakistan shows how differently it can be handled. Clinton’s team used a marked decoy jet and briefed the traveling press about the operation before it happened. The briefing covered the plan and its risks, according to the reporter who covered the mission and spoke publicly about the assignment for the first time this month.
Brennan’s argument leans on that contrast. Deception aimed at an adversary is not new in presidential travel, he suggested. Keeping the people inside the operation uninformed about their own exposure is a different matter entirely.
Jake Tapper, who once traveled with President Obama on a secret trip to Afghanistan under similar wartime security rules, said prior White Houses used deception to protect presidents. He described the Ankara operation as a departure from how those trips were typically handled.
The Qatari jet remains a lightning rod
The plane at the center of the switch has drawn scrutiny since Qatar donated it last year, a $400 million Boeing 747 the Air Force has spent months retrofitting for presidential use.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had joked weeks earlier that the Qatari jet was sounding much better. She made the remark after a separate mechanical scare grounded the older Air Force One en route to Davos.
Critics of the donation have argued the aircraft’s foreign origin and rushed security upgrades make it a harder plane to fully trust, a concern the Ankara threat has now given new weight.
White House defends its handling of the threat
Asked about the disclosure, White House communications director Steve Cheung said the Qatari-donated jet had been fitted with high-level security protocols to protect the president and his staff. He framed the plane swap as a precaution rather than evidence of a security gap.
The administration has not addressed why the traveling press pool and congressional oversight committees were kept out of that precaution while it unfolded around them.
Brennan, a frequent target of Trump’s public criticism and a figure the president has said he wants investigated, framed his comments as a standard shaped by his years managing presidential security. He presented the issue as a matter of established practice rather than partisan score-settling.
