President Trump and his top national security brass aggressively pushed back on reporting that Iran’s nuclear program was only set back a matter of months – a determination made by the administration’s own internal assessments.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said an investigation was underway into leaks of a preliminary classified report that determined U.S. strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend set the regime’s program back several months despite Trump insisting it was actually a matter of decades.
“Of course we’re doing a leak investigation with the FBI right now because this information is for internal purposes, battle damage assessments,” Hegseth told reporters at the NATO summit in the Netherlands. “And CNN and others are trying to spin it to make the president look bad when this was an overwhelming success.”
Trump called media outlets that reported on the internal assessment including CNN, The New York Times and NBC, “scum.” He insisted the U.S. attack carried out on Saturday by some of the U.S. most powerful ammunition led to “total obliteration” of Iran’s nuclear sites.
The internal report found strikes of the three facilities delayed Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months, despite initial assertions from Trump administration officials that those sites had been destroyed. The report also said Iran had moved much of its enriched uranium before the strikes, according to multiple outlets.
“They really don’t know,” Trump said of the report. “I think Israel is gonna be telling us very soon because [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] is going to have people Involved in that whole situation.”
Trump asserted that the strikes had set Iran’s nuclear program “basically decades” and equated it to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan that brought the end of World War II.
“This was an unbelievable hit by genius pilots and genius people in the military, and they’re not being given credit for it because we have scum that’s in this room. And not all of you are… CNN is scum. MSDNC is scum. The New York Times is scum. They’re bad people. They’re sick,” Trump said. “And what they’ve done is they’re trying to make this unbelievable victory into something less.”
Other Trump administration officials have similarly sought to undercut the reporting about the strike, even though experts had previously acknowledged it would take time to determine the extent of damage at Iran’s three nuclear sites that were hit.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the reporting “mischaracterized” the damage during a sit-down with Politico in the Netherlands.
Steve Witkoff, the administration’s special envoy for Middle East affairs, argued on Fox News late Tuesday that leaking the internal report was “treasonous.”
