Trump officials are on the hunt for the person who leaked details about a hostile meeting between the Pentagon and the Vatican earlier this year.In January, the Pentagon reportedly threatened an ambassador from the Holy See, days after the pope made antiwar remarks during his State of the World address. The U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, Brian Burch, told The New York Times Thursday that the meeting had been “grossly mischaracterized.” The 51-year-old co-founder of CatholicVote presumed the story came from the Vatican’s side, and personally called Cardinal Pierre for an apology for what Burch described to the Times as “an attack on the United States.”Burch told the national daily that he had also asked for the cardinal’s help in identifying “who was lying about the meeting.” The Times noted that Burch later posted a statement in which he claimed that Cardinal Pierre had “emphatically denied” reports of the confrontational exchange, and that the Vatican had confirmed the details of the meeting were exaggerated. The cardinal, however, did not respond to a request for comment from the Times. The Pentagon denied ever making such a threat.Pope Leo XIV has continually upset the president and a number of Donald Trump’s underlings through his relentless advocacy for world peace, particularly as it relates to the president’s warmongering. The Chicago-born pontiff has thus far railed against the White House’s lethal and unproductive attacks on small watercraft in the Caribbean, the sudden infiltration of Venezuela, and the escalating conflict in Iran, the last of which he said in June was not a “just” war.Trump, meanwhile, has not shied away from throwing his own fire at the religious leader. In May, Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that he believed the pope was “endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people” by advocating for global peace and prosperity. “But I guess if it’s up to the pope, he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” he said.Trump, however, has not done a very good job himself of stripping nuclear capabilities from Iran’s theocratic regime. Iran lacked a single bomb’s worth of uranium in 2018, three years after former President Barack Obama brokered the Iran nuclear deal to limit the country’s enormous uranium stockpile. But that changed later that year when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the pact and imposed a series of tough economic sanctions against the Middle Eastern country.By 2025, Iran had curated an 11-ton stockpile of enriched uranium, the whereabouts of which remain largely unknown. The total stockpile could create as many as 10 bombs if fully enriched, according to a 2025 assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency.On Wednesday, Trump indicated that he would no longer be willing to negotiate with Tehran’s leadership, suggesting that—despite having been president from 2017 to 2021—he had only just now started to understand Iran’s theocracy.“I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum,” Trump told reporters at a NATO summit presser in Ankara, Turkey. When asked what had changed since the memorandum of understanding was preemptively signed last month, Trump said: “I got to know ’em.”