President Donald Trump and his team are slamming CNN and The New York Times for reporting that U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities only caused minor delays—not destruction.
The details: CNN and NYT published reports based on anonymous sources inside the Trump administration, which claimed a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment found the bombings only set Iran’s program back “only a few months.”
- The outlets did caveat that their reports were based on “early findings” and “could change.”
- The New York Times exposed its bias by framing the story as one that “Upends Victory Lap Trump Was Hoping for.”
The Trump administration responds:
- President Trump said: “[T]hey’re both, disgusting, disgusting, really horrible groups of people. The pilots did an unbelievable job like nobody’s ever seen. They hit pay dirt.”
- Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the leak was “flat-out wrong” and came from a “low-level loser.” She added: “Everyone knows what happens when you drop 14 30,000-pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”
- Secretary of State Marco Rubio said: “This is what a leaker is telling you the intelligence says… They characterize it for you in a way that is absolutely false.”
- Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said: “Then the instinct of CNN and New York Times is to try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons.”
Zoom out: It’s worth noting that this leak from the Pentagon went to CNN’s Natasha Bertrand, who also famously reported that the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation.”
How about a neutral source? The UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said satellite images from Fordow and Natanz facilities revealed more damage than originally thought, including possible chemical contamination from the nuclear material.
How about a source in the region? According to the CIA, citing a “historically reliable” source, the nuclear program was “severely damaged” and “would have to be rebuilt over the course of years.”
The last word goes to goes to Iran itself, whose Foreign Ministry spokesman admitted to Al Jazeera news that “our nuclear installations have been badly damaged” by the U.S. strikes.
