WASHINGTON, Sept 3 (Reuters) – U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick apologized on Thursday for stating \u200cthat no Americans had died in the \u200cIran war, acknowledging that 18 service members have been killed \u200band he was thinking about Venezuela when he made the mistaken statement.<\/p>\n
“I misspoke. Eighteen members of our military have died, and to those families my \u200cheart breaks and \u2060I am so very sorry for their loss. I was thinking about the \u2060Venezuelan military operation where no service members died,” Lutnick said in a post on X.<\/p>\n
Lutnick made the comments \u200bduring an \u200binterview with CNBC \u200bon Wednesday in which \u200cVenezuela did not come up.<\/p>\n
“I think the way the president is playing Iran… There haven’t been American deaths. It’s really just an economic choke-out, which the administration is now executing more broadly, \u200cand I think it’ll be \u200bvery effective,” Lutnick told CNBC.<\/p>\n
Moments \u200bbefore Lutnick’s apology, \u200bTrump defended the commerce secretary on \u200cTruth Social.<\/p>\n
“Sec. Lutnick had Venezuela \u200bon his \u200bmind when he said nobody was killed. 18 people were killed in Iran!” Trump wrote.<\/p>\n
To \u200bdate, the U.S. \u200chas reported 18 military personnel killed and \u200bmore than 750 wounded.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Katharine Jackson; \u200bediting by Scott Malone)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON, Sept 3 (Reuters) – U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick apologized on Thursday for stating \u200cthat no Americans…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":276784,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[1792,11795,45283,34,75491,351,683,293,1705],"class_list":["post-276783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-iran","tag-americans","tag-commerce","tag-howard-lutnick","tag-iran","tag-lutnick","tag-reuters","tag-u-s","tag-venezuela","tag-washington"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/117207560452082697","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276783\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}