President Donald Trump on Friday slammed his handpicked Director of National Intelligence and the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear weapons program and claimed Tehran could produce a working weapon within “a matter of weeks” while offering no evidence to support the alarming assertion.
The president was speaking to reporters after arriving in New Jersey, where he will spend the weekend at one of the golf resorts he owns while occasionally huddling with advisers regarding Israel’s week-old war against Tehran. When he was asked to compare the current claims being made about Iran’s nuclear program with the assertions made about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the 2003 American invasion, Trump replied that the difference is that Iraq had no such weapons and claimed that he never believed Iraq possessed any to begin with.
But he then pivoted to claiming that Iran has a “tremendous amount” of nuclear material, which he said could permit the Islamic Republic to produce a working weapon “within a matter of weeks, or certainly within a matter of months.”
“We can’t let that happen,” he said.
Trump’s claims about Iran’s nuclear program directly contradict what Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress during a hearing last month on worldwide national security threats.
The former Hawaii congresswoman, who testified under oath, said the U.S. Intelligence Community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” and noted that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had “not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”
Asked about Gabbard’s sworn testimony based on the intelligence community’s assessment Trump replied:
“She’s wrong.”
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