President Donald Trump on Wednesday doubled down on his claim that U.S. bomb strikes completely destroyed Iran’s nuclear program, and he bristled at the attention being paid to an initial American intelligence report that suggests otherwise.
“It’s been obliterated, totally obliterated,” Trump said of the Iranian nuclear site at Fordo during a news conference, before he departed a NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands.
A preliminary U.S. intelligence assessment, however, found that America’s airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear sites did not completely destroy those facilities.
Rather, the U.S. bombings likely set Iran’s nuclear program back by a few months, not years, according to the assessment, which was first reported by CNN and matched by other outlets including NBC News.
Trump on Wednesday acknowledged the existence of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s report, which has not been made public but has been described to journalists by people familiar with it. But he suggested the data that informed it was insufficient.
“They did a report, but it was like, if you look at the dates, it’s just a few days after, so they didn’t see” the sites, Trump said.
“The report was not a complete report,” he said.
Trump added that the assessment said the damage from the U.S. attacks “may be very severe,” and complained that news outlets ignored that component in their reporting.
The reporting undermines claims from Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that the Saturday night strikes on Iran’s Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan sites had totally “obliterated” the country’s nuclear program.
The White House angrily pushed back on the report. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the initial assessment “flat-out wrong” and slammed the “anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community” who leaked the report’s findings to the press.
Hegseth piled on, saying in a statement Tuesday evening that “anyone who says the bombs were not devastating is just trying to undermine the President and the successful mission.”
The Pentagon has launched a “leak investigation” with the FBI, Hegseth said Wednesday. He also noted that the report was preliminary and was labeled “low confidence.”
Speaking alongside Trump at the news conference, Hegseth criticized “fake news” and defended the strikes.
“If you want to make an assessment of what happened at Fordo, you better get a big shovel and go really deep, because Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated,” he said.
The White House also sent reporters a screenshot of a statement from Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission, declaring that the U.S. strike on Fordo “destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable.”
The commission said the combined strikes from the U.S. and Israel have “set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years.”
Classified briefings for the House and Senate on the situation in Iran, initially set for Tuesday, were both abruptly delayed that same morning.
The Senate briefing was reportedly rescheduled for Thursday and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said his chamber’s briefing will be held Friday.
