president trump called off a retooaretaliatory strike sayinge loss of iranian lives would not be proportional. these measures represent a strong and proportionate response to iran s actions. reporter: last week president trump suggested the shootdown maybe ordered by a rogue commander and that iranian leadership did not approve it. in addition, the treasury department slaps sanctions on eight iranian military leaders including the head of the navy. what we announced today indicates it wasn t a mistake. it was intentional act. i wouldn t read anything into that nor designated people who believe are responsible for chain of command. reporter: president trump repeated his offer to meet iran s leadership without reconditions. we would love to be able to negotiate a deal. they don t want to, that s fine too. we would love to be able to.
harris: let s bring in john roberts for more on all of this. melissa, good afternoon to you, it was quite an extraordinary event, the first time we have had a briefing in well over 100 days. and it was the secretary of the treasury coming out today to announce these new sanctions against iran targeted at the supreme leader, the ayatollah human knee and his office, and it really is going for the top s time as opposed to intermediaries or a smaller fish, you go right to the top, the president thinks that he can probably put extra pressure on iran to try to bring them to the table. interesting the way that they targeted a number of military leaders as well, the suggestion i thought was that while the president said that last week s downing of the drone could have been an accident carried out by a rogue commander, it would suggest that you are targeting everybody from the supreme leader all the way down. and that may be the takedown was
debris from that drone that they shot down. it was very small pieces of debris. they say they shot it down at about 50,000 feet so a very, very high altitude. the debris that they founding was swimming in their territorial waters. the iranians maintain it was violating iranian airspace when they shot it down. then they said something which was quite troubling. because the iranians were saying that they could have shot down, they were looking at shooting down a p-8 american spy plane that they say was flying in the vicinity of the same area but decided not to do that. also because there was a crew onboard. that of course, brianna, dispels the things that president trump was saying yesterday when he said he believes that the iranians accidentally shot down the drone, that it was some sort of rogue commander. the iranians saying absolutely that was not the case. they know exactly what they re seeing up in the skies and they say shooting down the drone was a clear message to the united
anderson. pamela brown, appreciate it. thank you. cnn s fred pleitgen is the only western correspondent in tehran where it s early in the morning right now. he joins us. so president trump is saying it could have been a general or somebody who made a mistake and decided to shoot down this drone. is that what exactly are the iranians saying? ? reporter: well, the iranians are pretty much saying the exact opposite of that. i ve been looking for any sort of statements, any iranian commander, anybody from the military or politics that said this could have been an accident or some sort of rogue commander or even the iranians possibly trying to walk this back, anderson. so far there s been none of that. the iranians are clearly saying this was a deliberate shoot down of this u.s. drone because they believe the u.s. drone infringed upon the airspace, violated their airspace. and the interesting thing about this is, i ve been here 16 or 17 times now, anderson, and i have never seen the i
president trump, the lead in, where he says this could have been some sort of rogue commander, someone making a mistake. the iranians are unequivocally saying this is not a mistake. they are saying they shot down the drone because it went into their air space. the u.s. says the drone was shot down outside of iranian air space about 20 miles off the iranian coast. however, iran s foreign minister came out with a tweet and he even put coordinates in the tweet. we checked those out. those would put the site of where the drone was hit about 9 miles off iranian territorial waters which obviously would be inside iranian air space. so that is really where the dispute lies. the iranians continue to take a very hard line. they say they will defend their air space saying the u.s. violated the air space. the iranians lodged a complaint with the u.n. where they said, i just picked this up a couple of minutes ago, that they apparently tried to give the drone several radio warnings before shooting i