Two of Donald Trump’s top allies admitted a bombshell leak about the Iran strikes was true Wednesday.
But they then attacked leakers behind the release of the intelligence report that undercut the president’s claims about the success of U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Speaking on Wednesday in the Netherlands, where Trump is attending a NATO summit, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio mounted an aggressive counteroffensive after a leaked preliminary Pentagon assessment said the bombings likely only set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions by a few months. Trump had claimed the strikes amounted to a “total obliteration.”
At the press conference, Hegseth said the information was likely leaked for political purposes and said the FBI is conducting an investigation into the matter.
“We are doing a leak investigation with the FBI now, because this information is for internal purposes—battle damage investigation—and CNN and others are trying to spin it to try and make the president look bad when this was an overwhelming success,” Hegseth said.
“When you talk to the people who built the bombs, understand what those bombs can do, and deliver those bombs, they landed precisely where they were supposed to,” Hegseth went on. “And given the 30,000 pounds of explosives, and capability of those munitions, it was devastation underneath Fordow.”
Over the weekend, Trump authorized strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites—Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan—using 30,000-pound ‘bunker-buster’ bombs, which Trump claimed had devastated Iran’s nuclear program. But reports of a secret early intelligence assessment suggested the attacks likely set Iran’s nuclear program back by only a matter of months rather than destroying it completely.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Pentagon for comment.
“The amount of munitions—six per location—any assessment that tells you it was something otherwise, is speculating with other motives, and we know that, because when you actually look at the report—by the way, it was a top secret report—it was preliminary, it was low-confidence, so you make assessments based on what you know,” Hegseth said, also apparently apparently referring to the New York Times coverage of the report by claiming it said the damage was “moderate to severe.”
He added that he believes the damage was more likely “severe and obliterated,” decrying what he claimed is a “political motive” in the leak.
Rubio struck a more combative tone, criticizing leakers as “professional stabbers.”
“On this stuff about the intelligence—this is what a leaker is telling you the intelligence says,” he said. “That’s the game these people play. They read it and then they go out and characterize it the way they want.”
Rubio said that a “conversion facility” Iran would need to make a bomb has been “wiped out. He then conceded that “anything in the world can be rebuilt,” but argued “now we know where it is, and if they try to rebuild it, we will have options there as well.”
Hegseth and Rubio’s diatribe against the leak came after they were involved in an embarrassing leak of their own. They were both included in the Signal group chat in which sensitive details about the administration’s secret plans to strike targets in Yemen were discussed, without anyone realizing that a journalist had also been inadvertently added to the group.
Trump, meanwhile, conceded that the report was “correct,” but insisted that Iran’s nuclear plans had been set back by “decades.” He also angrily lashed out at “scum” who revealed the report.
“CNN is scum, MSDNC is scum, the New York Times is scum. They’re bad people, they’re sick,” Trump raged to reporters on Wednesday.
“What they’ve done is they’ve tried to make this unbelievable victory into something less,” Trump went on. “The generals and all of the people who did a good job, they get demeaned by these idiots at CNN, who can’t get ratings. The place is dying, nobody even wants to waste their time going on any of their shows, so they form what [sic] The New York Times, which is dying also. Without Trump, you wouldn’t have a New York Times.”
