Vice President JD Vance appeared desperate to claim “fake news” Sunday about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s wild announcement that a Qatari Emiri air force facility would be built in Idaho.
Last week, Hegeth announced that the U.S. would build a facility in America’s heartland to “host a contingent of Qatari F-15s and pilots,” summoning a tidal wave of disapproval from both sides of the aisle over the first foreign airbase to be built on U.S. soil.
But in an interview on Fox News’s Sunday Mornings Futures with Maria Bartiromo, Vance tried to backtrack the secretary’s claim, saying the whole thing was the sad product of “misreporting.”
“What is the function of this Qatar facility? People are wondering is this an airbase? What is Qatar gonna be developing in Idaho?” Bartiromo asked.
“Yeah, I saw some reporting about this, Maria. I actually talked to the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth this morning. This is largely a fake story,” Vance said.
“We continue to have, with countries that we work with, we have relationships where sometimes their pilots work on our bases, sometimes that we train together, sometimes we work together in other ways. The reporting that somehow there’s going to be a Qatari base on United States soil, that’s just not true,” he said.
“We are continuing to work with a number of our Arab friends to ensure that we are able to enforce this piece, but we’re not gonna let a foreign country have an actual base on American soil, so there was a bit of misreporting on that, as there often is, as you know, Maria.”
But there was nothing to misreport. Hegseth clearly said Friday that the Pentagon was “signing a letter of acceptance to build a Qatari Emeri air force facility at the Mountain Home Airbase in Idaho.”
Within days, either the White House seems to have shifted the goal posts on this deal, or Vance is simply lying to calm the angry mob. Or maybe no one knows what the hell is going on. Either way, the Trump administration is being less than transparent about its deal with Qatar, a country whose gifts the White House has readily accepted.