President Trump told an Arizona midterm rally that leakers who expose U.S. military secrets should be jailed and shot after raid timing hit the press.
Speaking in Bullhead City, Arizona, at a rally for Republican candidates, President Trump unloaded on whoever put the departure time of a sensitive military mission into the open. He said the leak named the hour U.S. forces were leaving Missouri and the hour they were due to arrive, details he said appeared in major news outlets.
The president framed the breach as more than a press scoop. In his account, it forced a last-minute halt to a planned raid tied to Operation Midnight Hammer, the bombing campaign that targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities last summer, before the mission went ahead on the original plan two days later.
The New York Post reported his remarks from the Wednesday rally, where he also urged votes for Rep. Andy Biggs and other Republicans on the ballot. Undefeated boxing champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. took the stage as well.
Trump did not name a suspect. He did not soften the penalty he wants.
"Somebody leaked, some sleazebag. They ought to go to jail and be shot. For the rest of their life, they should be in jail,"
he told the crowd.
Trump said the leak listed a 12:07 departure from Missouri and spelled out arrival timing too. He blamed The New York Times and CNN for carrying it.
"They leaked that we were leaving at 12:07 from Missouri, and it was in The New York Times, CNN,"
he said. He added that the leakers “leaked the time that we were leaving, the time that we were arriving.”
He said he spoke with Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and stopped the operation cold.
"I called off the raid,"
Trump said.
Two days later, he and Caine decided to move forward anyway. Same Missouri base. Same time. B-2 Spirit stealth bombers flew the mission.
Trump cast the strike as defense, not adventure. He said the point was to keep an adversary from holding a weapon that could “blow up millions of people in one shot.”
In that frame, publishing wheels-up and wheels-down times is not a abstract debate about transparency. It is a tip-off that can get aircrews killed and leave a nuclear threat standing.
Trump went further than a call for prosecution.
"In my opinion, leakers should be shot,"
he said. “In the old days, we used to shoot leakers.”
CSPAN posted a clip of the line on October 14, 2026, summarizing his claim that raid details landed in The New York Times and CNN and his stated view that leakers should be shot.
He is treating wartime operational security as a bright line. People who burn it, in his view, do not get a media waiver and a book tour. They get a cell, and, in his stated opinion, the harshest sentence on the books.
No charging document, named defendant, or independent public confirmation of the 12:07 publication sat in the rally coverage itself. What the audience heard was the commander in chief describing a compromise, a scrubbed launch, a restarted strike, and the price he believes leakers should pay.
The Arizona comments landed about a week after Trump approved a military firing squad to carry out the execution of Nidal Hasan, the convicted Fort Hood shooter.
Hasan killed 12 U.S. service members and one civilian and wounded 32 others in his November 2009 rampage at the Texas Army base. War Secretary Pete Hegseth has said Hasan’s execution in December will be livestreamed.
Trump’s rally line on leakers and his sign-off on Hasan’s method of execution sit a week apart. Both put lethal force on the table for people the president casts as having shed American blood or put American forces in the kill zone, one through mass murder on a base, the other through exposing a live mission.
The speech was not only about Iran and leaks. Trump pressed the room to turn out for Rep. Andy Biggs, the Arizona Republican running for governor against Democratic incumbent Katie Hobbs, and for down-ballot Republicans.
Mayweather kept the focus on national cohesion.
"America is the best country in the world. If I died and came back a million times, I would always choose America,"
the champion said, urging Americans to stick together and keep the country strong.
The president was due in Montana for another rally on Oct. 14, 2026, the same date stamped on the CSPAN post of the “leakers should be shot” clip.
Operational security is not a partisan hobbyhorse. Service members climb into B-2s on the assumption that takeoff times stay inside the wire. When those times surface in national outlets before wheels up, the risk shifts from the target to the crews and to the country they are ordered to defend.
Trump’s remedy is blunt, public, and rooted in an older wartime code: lock leakers up, and, in his opinion, shoot them. Voters in Bullhead City heard a president who treats burned mission timing as a life-and-death failure, not a staffing dispute for the press shop.
