B-2 pilots who flew Iran strike mission will visit White House on July Fourth

The B-2 pilots who carried out the strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities will visit the White House on Friday for the Fourth of July holiday, a White House official told The Hill.

The president will speak at a celebration that will include a flyover of B-2 bombers and other personnel from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, CBS first reported.

President Trump said the pilots are “going to come to the White House,” without specifying a date, in an interview on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” with Maria Bartiromo that aired Sunday.

The pilots earlier this month carried out the unprecedented attack on Iran, which has been dubbed Operation Midnight Hammer, dropping 30,000-pound bombs on underground nuclear enrichment facilities. The B-2s carrying so-called bunker busters took off from the base in Missouri and went undetected, which was all “part of a plan to maintain tactical surprise,” according to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Dan Caine. 

Trump has hit back at an initial Pentagon assessment that damage to the three nuclear facilities only set the Iranians’ nuclear program back a few months. He and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have insisted the strikes actually set the Iranians back years or decades.

In his discounting of the initial assessment, he argued that reporting about it demeaned the bomber pilots who flew the mission, claiming that the nuclear sites were “obliterated.”

“You should be praising those people. ... you're hurting those people,” Trump said last week at the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands.

Hegseth also held a news conference last week, during which he said the pilots were “undermined because your people are trying to leak and spin that it wasn't successful.”