The White House released a series of statements condemning reports alleging that the recent strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities did not destroy them completely.
In an article titled, “Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated — and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News,” the White House said, “The world is far safer after President Donald J. Trump’s highly successful, decisive precision strikes against the Iranian regime’s key nuclear facilities.”
“Take it from those who actually know,” the article said, going on to list statements from President Trump, Iran Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi, and IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, among others.
Trump administration officials further condemned the report during the NATO summit.
“We’re doing a leak investigation with the FBI right now because this information is for internal purposes, battle-damage assessments,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said during the event. “And CNN and others are trying to spin it to make the president look bad when this was an overwhelming success.”
Hegseth noted that the leaked report was preliminary and of low confidence.
The report from the Defense Intelligence Agency obtained by CNN alleging the strikes only weakened Iran’s nuclear programs rather than destroying them.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the report is “flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’ but was still leaked to CNN by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community.”
“The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program,” she said in a statement. “Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”
Trump discussed the CNN report during the NATO summit, saying, “I just want to thank our pilots. You know, they were maligned and treated very bad, demeaned by fake news CNN, which is back there, believe it or not, wasting time, wasting time. Nobody’s watching them. So they just wasted a lot of time, wasting my time. And the New York Times, they put out a story that, ‘well, maybe they were hit, but it wasn’t bad.’ Well, it was so bad that they ended the war. It ended the war.”
