Trump fumes over Iran strike intelligence report at NATO

President Donald Trump Wednesday doubled on his assertion that we bomb strikes completely destroyed the Iran nuclear program intelligence report that suggests the opposite.

“It was erased, completely erased,” Trump said about the Iranian nuclear site in Fordo at a press conference, before leaving a NATO summit in Hague, the Netherlands.

However, a preliminary assessment of American intelligence noted that US air strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites did not completely destroy these facilities.

The attacks in the United States have rather rejected Iran’s nuclear program for a few months, not years, depending on the assessment, which was reported for the first time by Cnn and matched by other points of sale, in particular NBC News.

Trump on Wednesday recognized the existence of the Defense Intelligence Agency report, which was not made public but was described to journalists by people who know him. But he suggested the data that informed that it was insufficient.

“They made a report, but it was as if you are looking at the dates, it’s only a few days later, so they haven’t seen” the sites, “said Trump.

“The report was not a full report,” he said.

He added that the evaluation said that the damage caused by American attacks “can be very serious” and complained that the media ignored this component in their report.

The report undermines the claims of Trump and the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth that Saturday evening strikes on the Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan of Iran sites had completely “erased” the country’s nuclear program.

The White House has rejected the report with anger. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt described the initial evaluation of “flat pain” and criticized the “anonymous loser of low level in the intelligence community” which disclosed the conclusions of the report to the press.

Hegseth hastened, saying in a statement on Tuesday evening that “whoever said that the bombs were not devastating try simply to undermine the president and the successful mission”.

The Pentagon launched a “flight investigation” with the FBI, HegSeth said on Wednesday. He also noted that the report was preliminary and was labeled “low confidence”.

Speaking alongside Trump at the press conference, Hegseth criticized the “false news” and defended strikes.

“If you want to make an assessment of what happened in Fordo, you would better get a big shovel and go very deeply, because the Iran’s nuclear program is erased,” he said.

The White House also sent journalists a screenshot of a declaration by the Atomic Energy Commission of Israel, declaring that the United States strike “destroyed the critical infrastructure of the site and rendered the inoperable enrichment center”.

The Commission said that the United States and Israel’s combined strikes “withdrawn Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons of many years”.

The classified briefings for the room and the Senate on the situation in Iran, initially fixed on Tuesday, were both suddenly delayed in the same morning.

The Senate briefing would have been reprogrammed for Thursday and the president of the Mike Johnson room, R-La., said that the briefing of his room will be held on Friday.