Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The White House and FBI on Thursday disputed claims of an internal government alert saying Iran wants to launch drones to attack the West Coast of the United States, saying that ABC News should move to retract its reporting.
A report and social media post from ABC News on Wednesday said that the FBI warned police departments in California of the potential threat. The media outlet said it cited an FBI alert that its reporters reviewed.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in an X post on Thursday, “No such threat from Iran to our homeland exists, and it never did.”
Leavitt said the ABC News story and X post “should be immediately retracted ... for providing false information to intentionally alarm the American people.”
“They wrote this based on one email that was sent to local law enforcement in California about a single, unverified tip,” she wrote. “The email even states the tip was based on *unverified* intelligence. Yet ABC News left out this critical fact in their story! WHY?”
Responding to ABC, FBI spokesman Ben Williamson said that ABC’s report omitted the word “unverified” from the bulletin that was sent by the FBI to its local Joint Terrorism Task Forces partners. He included a screenshot of ABC’s report and a screenshot text of the FBI’s bulletin.
“We recently acquired unverified information that as of early February 2026, Iran allegedly aspired to conduct a surprise attack” with drones targeting the United States from “an unidentified vessel,” the FBI bulletin stated, in part, according to his X post.
The bulletin added the law enforcement bureau has “no additional information on the timing, method, target, or perpetrators of this alleged attack.”
ABC News, which is owned by Disney, has not publicly responded to Leavitt or Williamson. The Epoch Times contacted ABC News for comment on Thursday.
The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department said in a Wednesday post that the office is keeping “an elevated level of readiness and is maintaining increased vigilance as we continue to protect our residents of Los Angeles County. We are working closely with our federal and local law enforcement partners to share intelligence and monitor the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and assess any potential impacts in our communities.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office office said the bulletin was one of many security updates the state receives from federal partners daily. California, it said, had elevated its security posture since the start of the Iran conflict.
In a message posted on X, the governor’s office said Newsom was “in constant coordination with security and intelligence officials” to monitor “potential threats to California—including those tied to the conflict in the Middle East.”
The confidential alert, issued by the FBI, surfaced publicly on Wednesday as the war, which began on Feb. 28 with massive U.S.–Israeli bombardments of Iran, stretched into its 12th day.
The Iranian regime, whose supreme leader and other top officials were killed in the air strikes, has responded with missile and drone aircraft attacks against Israel and several Gulf states that host U.S. military installations. The regime has said it would target commercial vehicles in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, while the country’s new leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, said on Thursday that the strait should remain closed indefinitely.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday, when asked by a reporter about Iranian sleeper cells in the United States, said that the administration is tracking most of them and knows where they are.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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