When Karoline Leavitt announced on August 12 that she would step down as White House press secretary at the end of the month, the official explanation was simple: motherhood. Leavitt, 28, said she could not "be the best mom my two young children deserve" while holding one of the most demanding jobs in Washington, and President Donald Trump praised her as one of the best press secretaries in the history of the office.
But an alternative account is circulating — and it deserves to be treated with considerable caution, given its origin. Nournews, an outlet linked to Iran's Supreme National Security Council, published a report this week claiming Leavitt's resignation was not about family at all, but the culmination of a bureaucratic power struggle inside Trump's inner circle. Citing an unnamed senior NBC journalist and unspecified "informed sources," Nournews alleges that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had long sought to push Leavitt out, and that matters came to a head after classified information about U.S. munitions shortages and war-damage assessments from the conflict with Iran was leaked to the press. According to Nournews, a five-day internal probe ordered by Hegseth named three suspects — Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler, a senior Hegseth aide, and Leavitt herself — with Rubio and Hegseth reportedly telling Trump directly that they considered Leavitt the leaker. The outlet further claims Trump grew visibly colder toward Leavitt afterward, including an alleged humiliating remark to her in early July, and that Leavitt pre-empted a humiliating firing by resigning on her own terms — after first leaking, as a parting shot, the story of Trump's use of a decoy cargo plane while departing Turkey.
None of these specific claims — the five-day probe, the three named suspects, the Trump-Rubio-Hegseth meeting, or Leavitt's alleged role in leaking the plane story — could be independently verified through Western reporting, and Nournews' sourcing is anonymous and unconfirmed. Readers should treat the account as an unverified, Iranian-linked narrative rather than established fact.
What is independently documented is narrower but real. A genuine controversy did erupt this month over U.S. munitions supplies during the Iran conflict: the Washington Post reported that Trump confronted Hegseth at Camp David over depleted stockpiles of precision missiles, which Hegseth reportedly blamed on his deputy, Stephen Feinberg. Leavitt publicly and forcefully denied the Post's account as "100% fake news," and Trump himself vowed to hunt down the "leakers," though Reuters separately confirmed the Army had used nearly all of its long-range precision munitions. Earlier, Hegseth had also launched an FBI probe into a leaked Defense Intelligence Agency assessment questioning the effectiveness of U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites.
Separately, the "decoy plane" story is real but distinct from Nournews' framing. Multiple U.S. outlets, including the New York Times and Washington Post, reported that Trump was secretly moved between aircraft while departing Ankara on July 8 amid an alleged Iran-linked threat — a threat U.S. intelligence reportedly could not fully verify. However, Forbes and the fact-checking site Snopes reported that Leavitt was not aboard either flight, contradicting claims — amplified by Iran's embassy in South Africa — that she was "betrayed" by being left behind.
For now, the true reasons behind Leavitt's departure remain unconfirmed beyond her own public statement.