President Donald Trump on Friday slammed his handpicked Director of National Intelligence and the Intelligence Community’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear weapons program and claimed Tehran could produce a working weapon within “a matter of weeks” while offering no evidence.
The president was speaking to reporters after arriving in New Jersey, where he will spend the weekend at one of his golf resorts, while occasionally huddling with advisers regarding Israel’s week-old war against Iran.
When asked to compare the current claims being made about Iran’s nuclear program with the assertions made about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the 2003 American invasion, Trump replied the difference is that Iraq had no such weapons and claimed that he never believed Iraq possessed any to begin with.
But he then pivoted to claiming that Iran has a “tremendous amount” of nuclear material, which he said could permit the Islamic Republic to produce a working weapon “within a matter of weeks, or certainly within a matter of months.”
“We can’t let that happen,” he said.
It comes after Iran’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, told state TV that no nuclear negotiations would take place while Israeli attacks on the country continued.
Trump’s claims about Iran’s nuclear program directly contradict what his Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress during a hearing last month on worldwide national security threats.
The former Hawaii congresswoman, who testified under oath, said the Intelligence Community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” and noted that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had “not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”
She did acknowledge, however, that Tehran’s stockpile of weapons-grade uranium was at levels that were “unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”
Asked about Gabbard’s sworn testimony based on the Intelligence Community’s assessment Trump replied: “She's wrong.”
The president’s denunciation of his top intelligence official comes days after he told reporters that he did not care about what Gabbard said during an impromptu media availability aboard Air Force One while returning from the Group of Seven summit in Alberta.
At the time, he said he thought Iran was “very close” to having a working nuclear weapon.
Gabbard, a former Democrat who defected to Trump’s side in last year’s presidential election and was selected to run the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in part because of her enmity for the nonpartisan experts and civil servants who Trump and his allies deride as the “deep state,” has been on the outside looking in as the president contemplates whether to allow American warplanes to use bunker-busting weapons against Iran’s Fordow enrichment facility.
The president is understood to have already green-lit a plan for U.S. warplanes to attack the facility, which is buried deep within a mountain near the city of Qom, but he has held off on final approval of the airstrikes in hopes the threat of American involvement would bring Iranian negotiators back to the table.
On Thursday, he issued a statement warning that he would decide whether to not to allow the airstrikes “within the next two weeks” because of what he called a “substantial chance” of negotiations with Tehran “in the near future.”
A day later, Trump told reporters in New Jersey that he’d provided Tehran with the 14-day deadline “to see whether or not people come to their senses.”
While Trump has suggested that he could engage in direct negotiations with Iranian officials at some point in the future, Iranian officials don’t seem as interested in speaking with the American president.
A round of talks in Geneva between Iran’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, and representatives of the U.K. and E.U. ended without any breakthroughs after Araghchi accused Israel of committing war crimes by bombing Tehran’s nuclear facilities, having already said prior to his arrival that he was opposed to negotiations.
In remarks broadcast on Thursday via Iranian state television, he said the U.S. was the side that is pursuing talks and warned that no direct negotiations would be in the offing so long as Israel continues the bombing campaign it kicked off last week.
“They’ve sent messages several times – very serious ones – but we made it explicitly clear to them that as long as this aggression and invasion continues, there is absolutely no room for talk or diplomacy. We are engaged in legitimate self-defense, and this defense will not stop under any circumstances,” he said.
Araghchi also said he expects the talks in Geneva to be limited in scope, focusing only on Tehran’s nuclear program.
U.S. officials have said that Iran’s ballistic missile program must also be part of any discussions to ward off an American attack, but Araghchi said the missile program is “for defending the country” and officially off the table.
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