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June 24, 2025 - Sean Hannity Show
31:38
American Strength - June 23rd, Hour 1
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This is an iHeart podcast.
All right, thank you, Scott Shannon, and thanks to all of you for being with us.
Here's our toll-free telephone number.
It's 800-941 Sean.
If you want to be a part of the program, I think we all need to stop and pause and be very grateful for the incredible men and women that serve in our military and for a president that has the moral clarity and deep understanding and common sense of a world that cannot live with the possibility of the number one state sponsor of terror having nuclear weapons and the incredible job.
We'll go into a lot of the specificity of what they were able to do and how they did it on Saturday night, the level of deception.
Well, first of all, the level of planning, the level, the bigger part of the planning before this mission ever even started was knowing and anticipating what possible retaliation there might exist, what risk any bomber might risk flying into Iranian airspace, the risk we know under Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Mayorkas.
You know, we have untold numbers of known terrorists, Iranian assassination squads.
The number of Iranians that were let into the country that we caught, never mind Godaways, is staggering.
I'll give you those numbers in a minute.
But the terrorists that made it into this country, everyone needs to understand they are already plotting and planning and scheming their attack, whatever it might be, on this country.
And that will be more blood on the hands of Biden, Harris, and Maorkas because they let them in unvetted and they didn't care.
And even when they knew they were from Iran, they still let them go.
I mean, this is insanity.
This is madness.
We talked often about the countries, over 200 of them, many with terror ties, and how these people were being allowed into our country.
They went in knowing the danger of the possibility of shutting down the straits of Hormuz, disrupting the free flow of oil at market prices.
We knew that possibility.
We also know there's a possibility that they may end up mining the straits, although I'm less of a mind to believe that now.
And we knew that our bases in the region, and we saw this on display in the last hour and a half, our largest base inside of the Middle East.
I was actually there, Doha in Qatar or Qatar.
You could say it either way, and it's both acceptable.
Had six missiles fired at it.
We'll get to that in a second.
But the level of planning, the level of deception, and it is at the highest level that we've ever heard of.
The incredible use of our intelligence, the amount of detail in the planning.
A lot of people don't know that a lot of Americans were taken out of the region in the lead up to this.
Before any of this started, they had anticipated and gamed out every possible retaliation effort that the Iranians might be involved in.
Then, of course, the absolute precision, the overwhelming might of the American military, the Tomahawk missiles fired from an amazing 400 miles away, every one of them a direct hit, incredible precision, how they did all of this completely undetected.
When you look at the timeline, it's incredible.
We should be proud at the level of detail and The professionalism and how blessed and lucky and fortunate we are to have the greatest military force on the face of this earth and a commander-in-chief with the common sense to understand the world cannot live with the number one state sponsor of terror married to weapons of mass destruction that has been doing everything in their power directly and through their proxies to wipe Israel off the map,
but also chanting even last Friday, Death to America and reaffirming just a few months ago from the Supreme Leader's mouth himself that their goal is ultimately to take down the United States of America and factoring in, of course, all the Americans that have died at the hands of the Iranians over the years.
It is the time for retribution has long come and gone.
Let me get into what has been breaking news for the last 90 minutes.
It started this morning when Qatar announced that they were shutting down their airspace, part of measures taken amid developments in the region, according to Qatari Foreign Ministry.
And they shut down the airspace because let me tell you what happened.
And even the New York Times now has a report on this.
Three Iranian officials familiar with the plans to attack our air base in Qatar said that Iran did in fact give advance notice to the Qatari officials that attacks were coming as a way to save faith.
This is a symbolic face-saving gesture, if you will.
If you give the Qataris and the Americans a heads up, yeah, we're going to fire six missiles, the same number of weapons that hit their one, the Fordo site with bunker busters as a means of acting like you're responding so you can use it as a propaganda point and tell the people in Iran, oh, yeah, we just destroyed them.
It is very consistent with how they acted in the past.
Now, what's amazing about this is if you go back to 2020 and the killing of Soleimani, it is, and at that point, it's kind of an underreported, untold story.
The United States was given a heads up when Iran, and Iran gave Iraq a heads up before they fired ballistic missiles at an American base in Iraq following the assassination of Soleimani, who's their top terror leader.
And it just shows you the depth of fear that the Iranians have of Donald J. Trump.
I mean, such a stark contrast to Barack Obama dropping cargo planes full of cash and other currencies and billions of dollars on a tarmac to appease the Iranian leadership in the hopes that we're going to come up with a nuclear deal.
Meanwhile, there's no any place, anywhere, anytime inspections.
And Obama, and I'll play this later in the program, was fully aware of the Ford site, for example.
If you want it for civilian purposes or nuclear power, you don't need to build it 300 feet into a mountainside, buried deep down inside that mountain as a means of fortifying it from an attack.
Although it didn't really serve them well or serve the purpose that they wanted here, but that in fact happened.
But it seems like that pattern of, yeah, we're responding, but just know that this isn't a real response.
And it's coming at this time.
And you might want to get your missile defense systems in place.
And you might want to be ready because we want to be able to tell our citizenry that we fought back and we got you good.
I mean, it's insane, but it's a culture, I guess, that is rooted in imagery.
And, you know, they had a face-saving effort.
I have no idea.
The thing is, and I've been when all of the talk and when Israel started this conflict and what the Israelis have been able to pull off is miraculous also.
All of this is going to be studied.
What Donald Trump did with these three facilities, both Bordeaux, Natans, and Esfahan, all three of these facilities, what he has been able to do is now made the world a safer place, a much safer place.
And what our military have been able to pull off here, you should be extraordinarily proud of.
I mean, it's after they were able to anticipate and game out any potential consequences to the attack and all the potential danger involved in it, and then to execute it to perfection is just,
it's just an amazing thing, kind of like the Israelis actually had drones inside of Iran and the known locations of their top scientists and their top generals and were able to take them out at the very beginning of this entire conflict most or flare-up.
And the fact that they were able to take down their air defense systems.
If you were ever going to do this, this was the time to do it at the level of safety that you would want for any American soldier that was flying a B-2 with these bunker buster bombs.
But anyway, upon the president's orders, Central Command under Eric Guerrilla executed what's called Operation Midnight Hammer, which was this precise strike against not one, not just the Fordeaux site, which is where most people thought this was going.
Now, conventional wisdom was that they would only need two bunker buster bombs.
When I spoke to the president before I went on the air for two hours on Saturday night, as this story was unfolding, he told me they used six bunker busters.
I didn't know it was on the one facility, although I was pretty sure it was on the Ford facility.
I didn't know that they also, in the end, used 14 of them.
And I'll get to that in a minute.
And then the Tomahawk missiles fired from 400 miles away from a U.S. submarine and every one of them hitting their target.
It is all of it's complex.
All of it is high risk.
And everyone involved in this, from the lowest level to the highest level, needs our debt of gratitude.
But it was designed to destroy and wipe out Iranians' nuclear ambitions and their complete infrastructure.
And it was successful.
And anyway, the main strike comprised of the seven B-2 bombers each had two crew members, and they were able to proceed quietly to the east with minimal to zero communications in an 18-hour flight.
And they were able to direct and divert the world's attention by sending B-2 bombers in another direction, vote for refueling in Guam.
And apparently, the entire world fell for it.
And that's where the media's attention was most of the day.
The aircraft completed multi-in-flight refueling things.
I actually lived through that when I went to Iraq on one occasion on a C-130.
It is a sight to behold when you see it in real life.
It is incredible.
A refueling plane will fly just above, in this case, the C-130, and literally you see this hose just waving in the air, and then it connects and it refuels the plane and you just keep going non-stop.
It's pretty amazing.
But the main strike package had these seven B-2 bombers and this 18-hour flight.
They completed, you know, all these refuelings.
And once over land, they lined up with an escort and support aircraft in extremely complex, tightly timed maneuver requiring synchronization across multiple platforms in a very narrow piece of airspace, all done with minimal communications.
And the integrity of the operation was a complete success.
I mean, you had nine stealth bombers used in total.
Two of them were decoys that flew west over the Pacific.
That's where the world's attention went.
And you had seven that were flying directly to Iran.
You know, my sources told me that they were actually, they were able to manufacture on radar screens that the Iranians were seeing phantom planes that they thought were American planes that didn't even exist and actually were firing at them while the real B-2s made their way undetected into the area.
And, you know, then obviously dropping the bunker buster bombs.
Only one submarine launched the 30 Tomahawk missiles into Iran at these other two facilities.
Four submarines were converted to become guided missile submarines, which carry 154 tomahawks, if you want, you know, the specifics of it.
And, you know, in every way, shape, matter, or form, this is it.
And what's going to be interesting to see is if the Iranians are going to use this ridiculous attack on with a head with the heads-up notice given, I think that shows the real level of fear that they have after what they experienced on Saturday night and how they have no control of their own airspace.
There is no way they can win this war.
You know, the mission for the president was really twofold.
He had said over and over, they cannot have nuclear weapons.
Then they go the 60 days on the 61st day of the Israeli strike.
And then the president says, okay, well, I warned you, you should have taken the deal.
And he said, I'll give them up to two weeks.
And that was on Thursday of last week.
On Friday, the Iranian foreign minister said no to any negotiations.
That probably expedited the president's decision to go in sooner than later and keep the element of surprise.
And that's just a guess on my part.
I'll tell you a lot more about what I know, what I was doing, who I talked to.
And I did have a number of conversations with the president.
And I'm just very grateful for our military.
I'm grateful for all the people that are willing to risk their lives to make the world and make America a safer place for all of us.
These are incredible people.
There's no military mission that does not have risk.
By the way, we're not out of the woods yet.
It doesn't mean that there is a lack of risk in the region.
We know that Biden-Harris Maorkis allowed known terrorists into the country, many from Iran.
We'll get into more detail on that in a second.
But I'm very grateful to every person in our military and every person in the Trump administration that pulled this off with perfection.
It's something to make America proud.
25 now to the top of the hour.
Thank you for being with us.
Here's our toll-free number.
It's 800-941 Sean, if you want to be a part of the program.
I'm not sure and don't have a feel yet as to how the president is going to respond to this, well, telegraphed Pinprick,
frankly, symbolic, you know, the six missiles fired at the our Qatar or Qatar air base that it's very reminiscent of what happened in 2020 after President Trump took out Soleimani.
It was a face-saving move.
I always go back to, listen to what the president says.
The president kept saying, and we have him on record since 2011, saying that the Iranians cannot have nuclear weapons.
Donald Trump does not make idle threats.
He just doesn't do it.
And President Trump was very clear, you should have taken the deal.
He was clear to the Iranians when he said that last week.
And then he gave them the ultimatum, which was unconditional surrender.
Two words, unconditional surrender.
And he made that last, he gave one last shot at a peace process and said within two weeks, he would be striking.
And then the very next day, the Iranian foreign minister probably sealed their fate when he made the comments.
No, we're not going to be, there's not going to be any conversation.
When he said that, I listened to that and I'm like, all right, it's over.
And it may have accelerated the timeline for the president.
But with all that said, the president, if you listen to him on Saturday night and all the comments that he's made since, he said when he announced that this had happened, that he was clear that he said the U.S. military carried out massive precision strikes on three key nuclear facilities in the Iranian regime, Ford, Natans, and Esfahan.
And he went on to say, everybody heard those names for years as they built a horrible destructive enterprise.
Our objective was the destruction of Iran's nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world's number one state sponsor of terror.
Now, this is in complete agreement with the Trump doctrine as was defined by his first term.
And he said, tonight I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success.
And he goes on, Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated, and future attacks would be far greater and a lot easier.
For 40 years, the Iranians have been saying death to America, death to Israel.
They have been killing our people, blowing off their arms, blowing off their legs, roadside bombs.
That was their specialty.
We spent a lot of time last week listing all the incidences and the number of dead Americans at the hands of Iranians, you know, going back to their forever war, if you will, against us since 1979.
And he said, we lost over a thousand people, hundreds of thousands throughout the Middle East and around the world have died as a direct result of their hate.
So many were killed by their general Soleimani.
I decided a long time ago that I would not let this happen.
It will not continue.
And then he said he thanked the Prime Minister of Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu, and described how they worked as a team.
He said, perhaps like no other team has ever worked before, we've gone a long way to erasing this horrible threat to Israel.
I want to thank their military for the wonderful job they've done.
More importantly, I want to congratulate the great American patriots who flew magnificent machines tonight and all of the United States military on an operation the likes of which the world has not seen in many, many decades.
He's correct on that.
Hopefully we'll no longer need their services in this capacity.
I hope so.
I also want to congratulate the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
And he said, you know, what spectacular, brilliant military minds were involved in this operation.
And he said, this simply cannot continue.
There will either be peace or there will be tragedy for Iran, far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days.
And he said, remember, there are many targets left.
Tonight's was the most difficult of them all by far and perhaps the most lethal.
But if peace does not come quickly, we will go after those other targets with precision, speed, and skill.
Most of them can be taken out in a matter of minutes.
There's no military in the world that could have done what we did tonight, not even close.
There's never been a military that can do what took place just a little while ago.
And tomorrow, and then he talked about General Kane.
Then he said, and, you know, and I want to thank everybody.
And he said, in particular, God.
And I just want to say, we love you, God, and we love our great military.
Please protect them.
God bless the Middle East.
God bless Israel.
God bless America.
Pretty powerful speech by the president, by any objective measure, but a spectacular military operation.
And, you know, it's not the first time.
I don't really want to get into the whole issue of the War Powers Act and the stupidity of it all, but I can go through the list, you know, Barack Obama, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, George W. Bush, Afghanistan, Iraq, Bill Clinton, Iraq, Serbia, Sudan.
Hit the aspirin factory that was, you know, basically a desert.
George H.W. Bush, Iraq and Panama, Reagan, Libya, Grenada, Jimmy Carter, nothing significant.
Gerald Ford, nothing significant.
But you get into these arguments, and they're just legally just on the wrong ground.
And of course, predictably, the left in this country, that was some Democrats, AOC leading the lunatics.
We've got to impeach him over this.
What they failed to recognize is that after 9-11, Congress passed a joint resolution that was known as the Authorization of the Use of Military Force Act.
There's a great piece by Greg Jarrett on this.
We'll put it on Hannity.com.
It granted the president exclusive extraordinary powers to target those groups, those nations that he determines aided the terrorist attacks or in the case of 9-11, harbored the perpetrators of 9-11.
The goal was to prevent any future acts of intentional terrorism against the U.S.
And one only needs to read the 9-11 Commission report that they were at war with us.
We weren't at war with them.
And the government of Tehran actively aided and abetted attack after attack after attack against Americans in the region and around the world.
And remember, we have Iranian assassination squads, which kind of brings us to the three things that the Trump administration was preparing for in the aftermath of this planned military operation.
One is the Straits of Hormuz.
The Iranians have moved to close that as of now.
There is a legitimate fear that they may ultimately, because their back is against the wall and people become desperate.
And at that point, they're capable of anything.
And they could mine the Straits of Hormuz and disrupt the free flow of oil in the region, which is anywhere between 20 and 30% of the world's oil supply.
And another fear was that they would go after American bases in the region, including the one in Qatar that they went after today.
But it was, again, symbolic, and apparently it given the Qataris and the Americans a heads up on all of it.
At least the New York Times is even reporting that.
But you can't say that this president has not tried to, you know, basically beg them to into a peace agreement that would have been in their best interest.
They were given every opportunity, every opportunity, if they wanted it, to take peace.
Now, the third thing that America has to worry about and is worried about, and they did factor in, is what about the 700 unvetted Iranians?
And those are only the people that we know about.
We don't know about the Godaways that are in the United States.
And this goes back to the most preventable national security threat ever.
And I have said for at least the next decade and probably longer, we are going to pay a price for Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Alejandro Mayorkas, and frankly, the Democratic Party, because they were either lying to us along with those three and saying that the border was closed and the border was secure, or they were just their silence was deafening in light of everybody with their own eyes seeing that the borders were wide open.
We knew that there were people from over 200 countries, including many countries with terror ties coming into this country.
But we do know that more than 700 Iranian nationals that illegally entered this country thanks to Joe Biden's open borders, according to data the center square obtained Sunday from a border patrol agent.
So border patrol is putting these numbers out.
And that includes 48 Iranian illegal border crossers apprehended in 21, 197 in 22, 462 apprehended in 23, and 797 apprehended in 24.
And at least 729 Iranians that they knew were from Iran entering our country illegally were allowed to stay in under Joe Biden's policies.
I mean, under the Biden administration, the greatest number of known or suspected terrorists were apprehended in U.S. history.
That number is estimated to be about 2,000 that we know of, but it's probably many, many more.
That's why I've been saying over and over again, yeah, it's probably not a matter of if, it's probably a matter of when, but I pray to God that I'm wrong that we're going to wake up one day and all these people that are here that have terrorized, what are they doing here?
They're plotting, they're planning, they're scheming another 9-11 or something, perhaps even worse, worse than that.
U.S. officials, the Iranian retaliation against U.S. troops, you know, they have been on notice now for some time.
But if you look at our military presence in the region, we are more than prepared.
And that's why, you know, even the New York Times is saying that this Iranian and Iranian officials are acknowledging quietly and trying to make sure and giving a heads up to the Qataris about the six missiles that they fired.
And that's all for propaganda purposes so they can go back to the population.
We devastated the American airbase and Qatar in response to their attack against us.
You know, one very weird, bizarre issue.
You have Russia's former president said yesterday that multiple countries are poised to provide Iran with nuclear warheads.
Really?
A number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads.
This is Dmitry Medvedev.
Remember him?
Medvedev did not list the countries that might pitch in.
I can't think of many of them.
Donald Trump responded to that today, and he said, Did I hear that the former President Medvedev from Russia casually throwing around the N-word nuclear?
He's used that in a number of press conferences and saying that he and other countries would supply nuclear warheads to Iran.
Did he really say that or not?
Or is that just a figment of my imagination?
Because if he did say that, and if confirmed, please let me know immediately.
Because, you know, that word should not be treated so casually.
I guess that's why Putin's the boss.
By the way, if anyone thinks that our hardware was great over the weekend, far and away, the strongest and best equipment we have, 20 years advanced over the pack, is our nuclear submarines.
They are the most powerful, lethal weapons ever built.
And we just launched 30 tomahawks.
All 30 hit their mark perfectly.
So, in addition to our great fighter pilots, thank you, you know, to the captain and crew.
But, and President Trump kind of taunting Iran, taking the bomb right out of their hands as it's revealed the attack was launched, you know, when the Ayatollah was snubbing a personal offer directly from the president.
I mean, this goes to the heart of what was going on behind the scenes here: the amount of deception, the absolute power and might of the U.S. military, the incredible intelligence of our intelligence community, the precision, the perfection of a military operation this complicated, how they remained undetected, how they sent decoys, you know, all over the place.
And the Iranians actually believed that there were planes in the sky that didn't exist, according to my sources.
I mean, that is a powerful statement by the president.
And so I think that the president's plan thankfully worked.
You know, but it goes back to the fundamental questions we were raising last week when we were even discussing the possibility of some involvement here.
And I know that I really don't mind people that are risk averse.
I don't even mind people that have different points of view.
What I don't understand is people that don't even want to comprehend the common sense argument, which is, let's see, they're the number one state sponsor of terror.
They have been solely responsible for killing however many hundreds or thousands of Americans in the region over the years.
The forever war started in 1979 against us, and they have kept it up.
They have fired, you know, either directly or through their proxies, over 100,000 missiles into Israel.
I've been to one town that was hit with 10,000 missiles, and there's only so much that can happen.
Now, I am hoping on the other side of this that there can be some good that comes of this.
I do believe there has to be a new Israeli doctrine at the end of all of this, that anybody that fires a single rocket into Israel, their new policy will be to obliterate them immediately.
They have shown too much concern for human life and their population too often is living in bunkers.
And, you know, and knowing that they care about humanity, you have Hamas's balloon and so on and so forth.
They would use schools and hospitals as their launching areas, knowing the Israelis would not fight back.
I don't think that can be their policy any longer.
They have got to immediately respond and respond overwhelmingly with devastating force, or this pattern will just continue to play out.
But for those that didn't see the wisdom in taking out the number one state sponsor of terrorist nuclear facilities, the entire world, not just the region, would be at risk, including the United States, because their missile capability keeps getting stronger and stronger.
Remember, they have 2,000-pound ballistic missiles that were about to become 4,000-pound ballistic missiles.
How much time are you going to allow them to build out their technology before you really see the wisdom in stepping in ahead of time?
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