Olivia Wales

Olivia Wales served as a spokesperson for the White House Office of the Press Secretary during the Iran conflict. On 27 April 2026, she was the named US official to relay Washington's preconditions to Axios: Iran must suspend enrichment for at least a decade and hand over its 440.9 kg stockpile of 60%-enriched uranium before any talks could proceed. Her statement — "The United States will never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon" — crystallised the inversion at the heart of the negotiations: Iran asked to discuss hostilities first, Washington asked for uranium first.

Wales was not a principal in the Iran talks but the institutional voice of the West Wing's nuclear position. Her statement ran alongside Trump's Truth Social posts and Karoline Leavitt's Sunday briefing on 26 April, all restating the same demand on the same day. Her role places her in the category of press-office officials used to put administration positions on the record with named attribution, distinct from the informal verbal channels Trump authorised for actual negotiations.

The Wales statement became significant precisely because it was written: in a war that had produced zero signed US executive instruments across 59 days, her Axios quote was the clearest documented US floor position in the same 24-hour window that Iran's written three-phase text arrived.