Dateline NBC - ‘Here’s the Scoop’ – an all-new podcast from NBC News, hosted today by Yasmin Vossoughian

Episode Date: June 23, 2025

Listen to today’s episode of Here’s the Scoop, the new daily news podcast from NBC News. Click below to follow the podcast on your favorite platform and add it to your evening routine:Apple PodcastsSpotifyAmazon Music

Hey, everybody. I'm Yasmin Vasugin. You're listening to the first episode of Here's the Scoop, the new daily podcast from NBC News to help you get caught up on the day's biggest stories. Enjoy the first episode. Hey, everybody, and welcome to our very first episode of Here's the Scoop from NBC News. I'm Yasmin Vasugin, and I'm your host today. Every day on this show, we're gonna break down the biggest stories of the day and why they matter, tapping our network of reporters stationed all across the world

to bring you the Inside Scoop. Today, obviously, we gotta start with Iran. In striking Iran's nuclear facilities, Trump and his advisors said American involvement in the conflict was one and done, that's it. Iran, though, has now launched retaliatory strikes against US forces stationed across the Mideast. The president, a couple hours ago, confirming that Iran gave

them a heads up and thanking them for the advance notice. So what now? And what do the Israelis do? Our chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, is on the ground for us in Tel Aviv and has covered the region extensively. Hey, Richard, thanks for being here. It's great to be with you.

And I'm so happy to be part of your first broadcast, but I'm not really surprised. A lot is going on. So if we take a step back, Richard, for a moment, do you think this has changed the game or not? Because we're hearing that Iran essentially gave a heads up that the threat was imminent. It looks like Iran gave a heads up and it looks like even if they didn't give one that the Qataris had one. If the Qataris had one, the Americans had one.

They're co-located on this base. They work together. But the reason why it seems clear that they had intelligence is before this attack took place, before these missiles were flying, The Qataris shut down the airspace. The Americans and British nationals, so civilians, were told to shelter in place. And then the attack came. When you read the statements that the Iranians put out, they were going out of their way to say this was not an attack on Qatar, that it was an attack on the American base, and

that it was a proportionate reprisal to what they had received from the US military. So they were trying to walk a very fine line saying, we attacked a legitimate military target after we were hit. The Iranians said they fired the same number of missiles on this base that the US fired on their nuclear facilities. And then it was over. And then it went quiet.

Nobody killed, nobody injured. They picked a very hard target. There's no way that these missiles were probably gonna get through there anyway. They picked the hardest target in the Middle East and fired a limited number of missiles at it. If this brings us into a giant war in the Middle East and if this is the trigger, well, it seems like it'd be a wild miscalculation. You know, it's interesting because this is somewhat similar to what happened after the killing of the IRGC head, Qassem Soleimani. They went after a US airbase in Iraq, even less so.

And so with that in mind, I'm thinking here that the Iranians are essentially saying, and especially the Iranian government is essentially saying, our hands are up, we're not going to win this thing. We don't want to look weak in the region, so we're doing this, but let's back off. So this attack, I think you can really describe it as symbolic. And it was probably designed to send a message to the Iranian, not so much the Iranian people, but to other regional powers and also to the regime itself. You know, they're the military commanders are being targeted left, right and center. The internet is out in Iran. Every time a new general steps up, there's a risk that he is going to be assassinated.

The Israelis have been saying, you better not take these new jobs as we're killing top commanders, you better not fill their vacancies. So the Iranians needed to show some strength, otherwise there's a risk that their entire security apparatus could just fade away. And no damage, no deaths, no injuries. So maybe this is an opportunity. They sent their message. Nobody got hurt.

Nobody got killed. They said, okay, they've balanced the books in their mind. Fine, maybe we can go to negotiations. And that, by the way, was the first response from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Qatar. They said they were all shot down, nobody hurt, it's over. Now it's time for a cessation of hostilities. Let's go to talks. So what I think though, Richard, that is really interesting of what's happening amidst all

of this is Israel is continuing to fire on Iran. And the places they are targeting is incredibly interesting, one of them being Evin Prison, which is essentially in the middle of Tehran. It is where political dissidents are held. And they targeted it in a way in which the prisoners were not harmed. They were actually released. They were able to leave the prison. And so to me, that says, as you're kind of looking at what it is that Israel wants out of this thing, right, the objective of what Israel wants, and ultimately the United States as well, is if you have political dissidents

pouring into the streets of Tehran, that that is essentially Israel wanting regime change, wanting the people to rise up. And what you just said, I think there was a little sort of, you listened closely what you said is what Israel wants and what the US wants. I'm not sure they necessarily see eye to eye and I'm not sure that they have the exact same agenda here. So President Trump and his administration have kind of tried to thread this needle that they want regime change,

but Trump says, well, maybe what's wrong with regime change if it's a bad regime? But the most consistent line is that they want regime change, but Trump says, well, maybe what's wrong with regime change if it's a bad regime? But the most consistent line is that they don't want regime change. They want to attack the nuclear facilities. The Israelis have been saying that, but their actions don't match that. They've been attacking the Iranian military leadership on a daily basis. The Israeli defense minister said that the Iran Supreme Leader should no longer be allowed

to exist. They have been carrying out these new attacks that you're talking about against what they're calling centers of Iranian repression. So they attacked the Avin prison, hitting the door, being political prisoners, although the Iranians said they regained control of the prison, hitting the Basij. Now the Basij is a domestic security force of the Revolutionary Guard that is generally used to carry out repression, to keep the people in line.

A police headquarters has been hit. And this is, I think you could only describe this as a tool of regime change. You're trying to take away the tools that the Iranian state uses to keep itself in power. So that said, Richard, did Iran blink today? And if in fact they did, how does Israel respond, considering what we think their objective is?

So that I think is the bingo question here. They blinked to a degree. I mean, they hit a hard target that they had really no chance in a world of doing much damage to. Now, where does it go from here? I don't know, is President Trump gonna use this as a pretense to clobber them? Will the Israelis stop?

There's mixed messages. Prime Minister Netanyahu just said today that, well, we're kind of getting to the end of our objectives. We're not going to stop early, but we're heading toward a conclusion. The official objectives that Israel has laid out for itself are not regime change and are not killing the Ayatollah and not doing the succession for them. It is to eliminate the nuclear threat and to eliminate the ballistic missile threat. If Israel can say in a couple of days it's done that, and Iran can say that it's responded,

maybe we can back off from the brink. Richard Engel, my friend, I appreciate you jumping on with us amidst this breaking news. We'll be talking to you again very soon, I'm sure of it. Be safe. Great to be with you. Thanks. Thank you, Richard. All right, we are going to take a quick break when we come back. We're going to go inside the White House. Hey, everybody, Yasmin Vassou again here, and we're back with Here's the Scoop from NBC News.

The White House is now weighing how to respond to Iran's retaliatory strikes. We've got our chief White House correspondent, Peter Alexander with us. Hi, Peter. Hi, Yasmin. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being with us. I was just speaking with Richard Engel

on the ground in Tel Aviv, and he's kind of framing this thing as if Iran blinked, giving a heads up according to some of his reporting before they launched on this U.S. airbase. With all that in mind, the question is now how is the US gonna respond? What are you hearing from inside the White House? Well we know those conversations have been happening throughout this day inside the White House, the President meeting in the Situation Room, monitoring the situation at those airbases throughout the region with Dan Cain, the Joint Chiefs Chairman,

Marco Rubio, his Secretary of State Pete Hegseth, of course, the Secretary of Defense, and obviously the Vice President, JD Vance, as well. So in some ways, it's a bit of a waiting game. But I think among the questions that Richard touches on is how much of this by Iran was, in effect, performative to demonstrate for domestic political consumption in Iran. Look, we're firing back. We have the capabilities. We are going after the Americans here. The idea that the Iranians would have tipped off Qatar,

that shared it with the US, would make sense through that lens. Separately, though, I don't think anybody can say with any certitude that that would be the end of the story here, right? Perhaps the initial retaliation might happen within 48 to 72 hours, but this could last from everyone I've been speaking to for days, weeks, months, or even years here.

And among the real questions, where is the highly enriched uranium? Can the USA with certainty that that was destroyed as a function of this right now? Jeremy Bash, one of our national security analysts, said something that I thought was so striking. He said that this is gonna be one of the most complex, maybe even contentious battle damage assessments

that the US intelligence community has ever had to undertake. Peter, you and I spoke before this retaliation from Iran, and you painted this picture of the White House being triumphant today after the strikes or the weekend at the nuclear sites. What is the sense inside the White House now? It's a good question that that idea of them being triumphant, the words initially that came from Keith Kellogg, one of the president's top advisors who was partly in charge of the efforts to find a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. He posted today saying in parts of the West Wing and the

executive office building places that I can't get that there was a quote different feel as he described it. This sense of a triumph here like a sports team after winning a championship. And I brought this up to some of the White House officials with whom I was speaking and they were, I think, a little bit sensitive to this idea of we're triumphant, but you can see, you can feel it in the energy that is in parts of the White House right now. This individual said, you know, we do have this real sense that we were a part of history

in effect in what we did. There was a pride, as this person said, the camaraderie on the president's team is very high, but you know, those are risky words because it was a historic moment and the best case scenario is it was successful, all American service members came home safely. The question is what happens now? What happens in the days, weeks and months ahead? What happens now?

Peter, you covered this president extensively. Do you think part of his calculation deciding to strike Iran over the weekend was becoming a part of the history books? I don't know that it's a function of the president wanting to be a part of the history books, although I'm certain that he recognizes the historic nature of what he would be doing. For the president, there is sort of one image, one word that matters most to him,

and that's the idea of strength, presenting strength in any scenario, over empathy, over over certainly over weakness. And here given the opportunity to sort of, you know, to do something that no president before him had done the each of the last four presidents, Bush, Clinton, Obama, Biden had all considered and chose not to do the I'm certain that that played some role in the president's decision making here. And I'm certain that he has evidenced by what we're hearing from him, even overnight, touting on social media, taunting the Iranian saying in effect,

the U S took the bomb out from their very hands. The president likes the idea that he was, you know, that this was a master plan that he came up with in his eyes and that it demonstrates in his view, his strength. Peter Alexander, for those that cannot see, providing a bit of levity for us with your teal headphones. We appreciate you, my friend. A hat's it to my daughters. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. And before we go, a few headlines. Why is it when it's too cold you want hot, and when it's too hot you want cold? That is what many Americans and me are dreaming of today. From the Midwest to the Northeast, Mother Nature is turning up the heat and half the

country is feeling it. Some areas could hit heat index values between 100 and 110 degrees. Really hot! The fans are all on high. And just as a scorching heat wave turns the U.S. into a giant toaster oven, the EPA has a suggestion. Set your thermostat to 78 degrees when you wake up for comfort and efficiency. Comfort at 78? That is not cool. That is a slow, slow roast. So while the agency insists it's going to help lower energy bills and save the planet,

Americans everywhere have a persistent upper lip sweat just sitting in their living room. That's why every FedEx office has a clock. Because we live or we die by the clock. So that's Tom Hanks in the movie Cast Away. Why did we play that clip? Well, if you remember in the movie, besides the whole stranded on an island thing, Hanks worked for Federal Express. Well, FedEx founder Fred Smith, who revolutionized global logistics,

has died at 80 years old. Smith didn't just build a company. He reinvented how the world moves. What began as a Yale term paper outlining a novel overnight delivery system became FedEx, a global logistics empire renowned for its efficiency and its pioneering hub-and-spoke network

that fundamentally transformed shipping. The path to success was far from smooth. Rumor has it that in 1974, with FedEx facing imminent bankruptcy, Smith took the company's last $5,000 to Vegas. His gamble at the blackjack table netted $27,000, a sum that famously kept the company's planes in the air during that critical period. Smith then ushered in a new era of global commerce.

His vision made fast, reliable delivery the standard and helped keep the modern world running on time. And speaking of time, we're out of it. That's gonna do it for us. Thanks for joining me on our inaugural episode of Here's the Scoop from NBC News. I'm Yasemin Vesugin. We'll see you tomorrow with whatever the day may bring.