President Donald Trump is standing by his claim to have completely destroyed three Iranian nuclear facilities with airstrikes using bunker-busting bombs and submarine-launched cruise missiles over the weekend despite a U.S. intelligence assessment that says the audacious attack only inflicted enough damage to set Iran’s nuclear weapons program back by a few months.
Speaking at a media availability with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte on the sidelines of the NATO leaders summit in The Hague, Trump was asked to respond to media reports about a leaked Defense Intelligence Agency report suggesting that the 30,000 bombs dropped by B-2 bombers on Saturday did not completely destroy the underground Fordow enrichment facility, where Iran was feared to be enriching uranium to weapons grade purity.
He replied: “We hear it was obliteration. It was a virtual obliteration.”
The president also said he was waiting to hear more from the Israeli government’s own intelligence estimates and suggested that Iran had not had time to remove any of their uranium supplies from Fordow or other facilities.
At that point, he ceded the floor to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who claimed the Massive Ordinance Penetrator weapons dropped on Saturday had “landed precisely where they were supposed to” during the “flawless” mission, providing “devastation underneath Fordow” and the other targeted facility.
The former Fox News television presenter then pivoted to attacking the motives of the Defense Intelligence Agency analysts who’d written the assessment by telling reporters that anyone who would say anything except echo his claims was “speculating with other motives” while simultaneously deriding the report as “low confidence.”
The damage to the facility was “moderate to severe, and we believe far more likely severe and obliterated,” he said, adding that the intelligence estimate was likely done with a “political motive.”
“We’re doing a leak investigation with the FBI right now because this information is for internal purposes, battle damage assessments, and CNN and others are trying to spin it to make the president look bad when this was an overwhelming success,” Hegseth added.
At that point, Trump jumped back into the fray by calling the mission “an unbelievable success” and accusing the press of being “really demeaning to the pilots and the people that put that whole thing together” before describing the strikes as a “perfect operation” and passing the baton to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who in turn attacked the U.S. intelligence community and the motivations of whoever leaked the DIA assessment to the press.
“This is what a leaker is telling you. They read it, and then they go out and characterize it the way they want it characterized. And they’re leakers. This is the game they play,” said Rubio, who is also serving as Trump’s acting national security adviser.
He also claimed that U.S. officials can no longer see where the targeted Iranian facilities were on account of the damage inflicted by the strikes over the weekend.
“You can’t even find where it used to be, because the whole thing is just blackened out. It’s gone. It’s wiped out. It’s wiped out,” he said before returning to attacking whoever leaked the damage report.
“This leaker stuff, these leakers are professional stabbers. That’s what they are. They go out and they read this stuff, and then they tell you what it says … but they characterize it for you in a way that’s absolutely false,” he said.
