Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Briefs Members of the Media, Feb. 5, 2025

February 5, 2025 · The White House · 0:34:36

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt briefed members of the media at the White House on Feb. 5, 2025, carried on the White House channel. She opened with the weekend release of American-Israeli citizen Keith Siegel and two Israelis held by Hamas since October 7, 2023, saying the administration was committed to freeing all remaining hostages, and recapped the President’s first foreign-leader meeting of the term, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the day before. Of the President’s proposal for the United States to take over Gaza, announced the previous night, she said it underscored his commitment to eliminating Hamas and securing a lasting peace for the region, calling him an outside-the-box thinker, as she stated it.

On trade, Leavitt said that in response to the President’s tariffs that week, Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum had agreed to permanently supply 10,000 Mexican soldiers on the U.S. border designated to stop fentanyl and criminal aliens, and Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had agreed to appoint a fentanyl czar, list cartels as terrorists, and increase resources at the northern border - and that the President had paused implementation of the tariffs for one month while negotiations continued, as she stated the steps. She also previewed the afternoon’s women’s sports executive order, describing its Title IX enforcement terms, and, asked how owning Gaza squared with America First, rejected the premise that it forced entanglement abroad, saying the President had not committed to putting boots on the ground in Gaza and that the United States would not pay for its rebuilding, as she stated it.

Why it matters

The Feb. 5 briefing is the administration’s first full defense of the Gaza proposal and its first accounting of what the tariff threats extracted from Mexico and Canada - the two files, stated by the Press Secretary the day after the Netanyahu visit, that this chronicle checks against the deals that followed.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the Mexico and Canada steps as stated on Feb. 5, 2025 (10,000 Mexican soldiers permanently on the border; a Canadian fentanyl czar and cartel terrorist listings) and the one-month tariff pause - recorded here as stated at the podium.

Sources: The White House, “Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Briefs Members of the Media, Feb. 5, 2025” (YouTube, 2025-02-05) - official description and broadcast transcript as aired.