Exclusive — Steve Witkoff Shreds His ‘Total Fake News’ Critics: ‘The Neocon Element Believes That War Is the Only Way to Solve Things’
WASHINGTON — Steve Witkoff, a senior adviser to President Donald Trump and key negotiator for the president on a number of fronts worldwide, told Breitbart News exclusively this week the president prefers diplomacy over military intervention when available as an option to solve a conflict.
Witkoff sat for a nearly 40-minute on-camera interview at the White House with Breitbart News on Thursday afternoon. The interview was taped in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB) where the Trump White House has converted an old auditorium that former President Joe Biden used as his fake Oval Office set into a television interview studio to film interviews like this. In this first part of the interview, which also focused on the various theaters worldwide where Witkoff is engaged from Iran to Russia to Gaza and more, Witkoff gives a broad overview of his charge and the president’s views on these matters. He also tells a little about the history of how he got to where to he is and how he and Trump have known each other forever from their New York business days. Witkoff also aggressively and forcefully responds to recent critics, arguing that in many cases many of them do not want his negotiations to succeed because many of them prefer war to peace.
“He [Trump] believes in peace through strength, which essentially means that resorting to violence and war is not necessarily in the best interest of the country and not necessarily the best way to effect truces, ceasefires, permanent peaces—whatever we want to call it,” Witkoff said. “He’s the leader of a superpower, the most powerful nation on the earth, and if he wanted to he could exert military force everywhere but he just doesn’t think it’s productive in many circumstances. So, dialogue and diplomacy are an avenue he wants to pursue each and every time because if he can get to a successful resolution that’s in the best interest of the United States peacefully that’s a better prescription for solving some of these world problems that we’re facing.”
Matt Boyle sat down with Steve Witkoff to listen as he aggressively and forcefully responded to recent critics. (Matt Perdie/Breitbart News)
Asked how he got engaged in this universe of peace-deal-making, Witkoff said he and Trump have been close forever and when he was engaged in helping Trump fight the lawfare nonsense from New York Attorney General Letitia James and from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, he and Trump began talking lots about the Middle East.
“Well the president and I are very close friends. I treasure that,” Witkoff said. “I call it a blessing in my life. It really is because he’s an inspiration to me in a lot of ways. Before he was elected, he was being persecuted—four separate trials which I thought were abhorrent. I said it publicly. I testified for him in his AG case. I came with him and spent a lot of time at his criminal proceedings that Alvin Bragg was running that felt like a completely rigged situation. We just talked endlessly about lots of things and when he first got elected he asked me ‘would you consider doing something?’ What I always wanted to do was do something that felt worthy, that felt consequential, that felt bigger than myself. We talked about the Middle East and so that’s how it came to be. I of course didn’t understand the dimensions of it but now I do—the awesome responsibility that it is. But working for him is an amazing thing because he sets the table for people like me.”
In recent weeks, Witkoff has found himself fending off a number of critics—particularly from globalist institutions like Rupert Murdoch’s empire including especially the New York Post—arguing that he is not effectively handling these various negotiations he is leading. Witkoff is currently overseeing a vast, sprawling portfolio: Denuclearization talks with Iran, helping with peace talks with Russia over the war in Ukraine, peace in Gaza, and talks to expand the Abraham Accords between Israel and Arab nations. Witkoff has been flying around the world at a frenetic pace meeting with many key people including Russian President Vladimir Putin—when Witkoff travels he pays for it himself too, not costing taxpayers anything—and the Post’s Douglas Murray viciously attacked him in a column published in late April.
Since then, the Post has published other pieces attacking Witkoff based on claims compiled by a think tank called “Foundation for Defense of Democracies.’ This group has been funded in large part by a variety of other foundations—a kind of neocon version of an institutional left umbrella group—as well as a constellation of top Republican and Democrat donors over the years. It’s worth noting that the very same New York Post did not want Donald Trump to win the GOP primary in 2024–the newspaper went all in for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over Trump–and then later when he did the newspaper audaciously tried to lobby Trump very aggressively to pick someone other than Vice President JD Vance as his running mate. The paper was wrong again, and Witkoff seems to be just the latest casualty of the Murdoch empire’s globalist obsessions.
Asked to respond to these critics, Witkoff did so forcefully in his interview with Breitbart News.
“Douglas Murray was particularly frustrating because nobody called me and they didn’t give me an opportunity to rebut, dispute, tell my side of the story,” Witkoff said. “I think they largely got it wrong and I think that was a mistake on their part so I chalk it up to that. But to me, I follow the president’s credo. The best way to respond to criticism is to do good things. I actually believe—I’m very loyal to the president but I actually believe in his policy. I really do. I believe in his policy of attempting to settle the Iranian conflict through dialogue. First of all, that’s a more permanent solution to that crisis than any other alternative. That would physically change exactly how Iran was approaching a nuclear program. If we get them to voluntarily shift away from an enrichment program where they can enrich to not have centrifuges, to not have material that can be enriched to weapons-grade levels 90 percent, if we can get them to voluntarily do that that is the most permanent way to make sure that they never get a weapon. So his prescription for the solution there is the best prescription so hopefully that is something they want to do because as he says the alternative is not a great alternative for them.”
Another criticism that Witkoff faced recently came from Politico, where the outlet claimed that Witkoff and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were having differences in some of these negotiations. Witkoff told Breitbart News this could not be further from the truth.
“It’s total fake news. The Secretary of State and I are close friends,” Witkoff said. “We don’t just have a cordial working relationship together. We have a real friendship, a deep friendship, and we confer—we talk all the time. I might talk to the Secretary of State five to seven times a day. That’s on our telephones. I’m not even talking about Situation Room calls or meetings that we have or joint meetings we have in the Oval Office. We are—there is no daylight between us. We are both very, very similar in our policy approach. So I read that story and I thought to myself, ‘who are they talking about?’ I could not figure out who they were talking about.”
Asked whether he thinks these critics are attacking his negotiations because they want war instead of peace, Witkoff said there is absolutely a “neocon element” out there that “believes war is the only way to solve things.”
“I say it’s confirmation bias. They believe, they have a bias toward military interaction,” Witkoff said. “So in their minds anything that is of a military nature to be a solution to that problem, they have a bias towards that. They give no consideration whatsoever on what the consequences are on that. You hear this all the time, you hear people say ‘no, no we have to go treat that person with force. The Iranians are going to manipulate you in a dialogue and so you’re not going to be effective there.’ They may attempt to manipulate me. I don’t think they’re going to be able to manipulate me. In that particular example, if the Iranians make the mistake of thinking they can procrastinate at the table then they won’t see that much of me and the alternative as the president says will be a bad alternative for them. But you’re right: The Neocon element believes that war is the only way to solve things. The president believes that his force of personality, the way he is going to respond to certain situations, can bend people to do things in a better way in the interests of the United States government. I believe in that too.”
Another criticism that Witkoff has faced from some dark neocon corners is that he should not be meeting with people like Putin alone. Notably, Witkoff met with Putin without a cadre of aides joining him—and some globalist types argued that he should not be doing that.
But Witkoff, in his interview with Breitbart News, pushed back on that criticism saying the alternative is what Biden did during his failed administration where Biden had no communication at all. Under Trump, Witkoff said, the president directed him to engage to try to work out a better solution.
“I think some of them are well-meaning. That doesn’t mean that well-meaning translates into doing the job in the way that is most efficient,” Witkoff said. “So I think that people are well-meaning—but there are some that have bad motivations. I have no doubt about that. But I don’t think everybody has a bad motivation. I just think they’re used to doing things a certain way that has historically been that way and it’s very inert and bureaucratic and it doesn’t seem to work. The Israeli negotiations, the hostage negotiations are a perfect example of it. They spent 15 months working on that hostage negotiation and we came in—and ‘we’ means the Trump administration—and we were able to correct what had not been an efficient negotiation. We got a lot of hostages home alive as a result of that. I think the president wants things done a different way. He wants a more proactive approach. He wants people getting out in the field. My meetings with Vladimir Putin—outsiders were not invited. Should I have said to Vladimir Putin: ‘I don’t want to open up a dialogue with you, I don’t want to have a relationship with you’? Biden hadn’t talked to him for three and a half years. At the direction of the president, I had the opportunity to make contact with President Putin. He is the central protagonist in that conflict. If we’re not talking to him, how do we think we’re ever going to effect a resolution? It’s not even possible. So the notion that we’re not supposed to talk to him is preposterous, or that I should talk to him and condition those talks on being able to bring an interpreter there or other people there. I did not need anybody there. It actually worked better being there alone and then downloading our leadership, our foreign policy team, afterwards.”
Much, much more from Witkoff’s exclusive with Breitbart News is forthcoming, including in-depth focuses on Iran, Israel and Gaza, Russia and Ukraine, and the broader geopolitical and economic motivations behind Trump’s push to expand the push for peace worldwide.
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