WASHINGTON—Legacy media outlets are claiming that United States military strikes failed to destroy Iran’s unclear program in an effort to undermine President Donald Trump, administration officials told The Daily Wire.
CNN and the New York Times published stories Wednesday citing officials allegedly familiar with the findings of an early Defense Intelligence Agency assessment claiming that the United States failed to destroy Iran’s unclear program and only set it back by months. The Times specifically argued that the report upended the victory Trump had hoped to celebrate at the NATO summit.
Trump’s team has pushed back on the stories, with the president himself saying Iran’s nuclear sites were obliterated. Israel has also said the sites were obliterated, and Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei affirmed, “Our nuclear installations have been badly damaged, that’s for sure.”
The FBI is investigating the leak of the intelligence assessment, a senior White House official told The Daily Wire.
On Wednesday, the president again reiterated this stance during a press conference at the NATO summit in the Netherlands.
And in a Truth Social post afterwards, he cited Israel’s public statement backing him up, stating: “Israel just stated that the Nuclear Sites were OBLITERATED! Thank you to our great B-2 pilots, and all others involved!”
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Trump, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the NATO Summit (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Administration officials told The Daily Wire that the assessment CNN and others are citing is merely a snapshot analysis based on limited intel from one moment in time. The reporting being publicized, according to an administration official, is not even the whole picture of the assessment but merely parts that the Trump administration believes were purposefully leaked in an attempt to undermine the president.
The information was leaked to Natasha Betrand, a CNN reporter known for her reporting denouncing the Hunter Biden laptop story — which was completely true — as “Russian disinformation.”
“The instinct of CNN and New York Times is to try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons to try to hurt President Trump and our country,” argued Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth from the NATO summit, adding, “they want to spin it to try to make the president look bad based on a leak. We’ve all seen plenty of leakers. They have agendas.”
The assessment was specifically based on intel from one day, June 22. The actual assessment admits that it was not only not coordinated with the intel community, but also a low confidence level report with several gaps in information, the administration official shared.
“Parts of this inconclusive, low confidence intelligence assessment were leaked from deep state intel analysis to deep state news,” that administration official said.
A senior Defense Intelligence Agency official similarly told The Daily Wire that the assessment was a “low-confidence” report that is still being refined.
Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
“This is a preliminary, low-confidence report and will continue to be refined as additional intelligence becomes available,” the official shared. “We are working with the appropriate authorities to investigate the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed back on the reporting in a statement to CNN, arguing that the alleged assessment 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,” Leavitt said. “Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”
CNN and the New York Times did not immediately respond to requests for comment.