Donald Trump threatened in an interview Sunday to force journalists who published an initial U.S. intelligence assessment of his administration’s strikes on Iran to reveal their sources as his effort to plaster a positive narrative over the aftermath continues.
The U.S. president spoke on Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo, and insisted once again that U.S. airstrikes targeting three Iranian facilities last weekend completed the task of disabling the Iranian nuclear weapons development program. The strikes, Trump claimed, obliterated the Iranian government’s entire (or a majority) of its supply of enriched uranium — he denied claims from Iranian officials that it was moved out of the area before the Fordow site was hit.
And the president vowed legal action against Democratic members of Congress and journalists he blamed for publishing parts of a U.S. intelligence assessment of the effects of the three attacks. The administration spent the past week decrying it as one-sided, incomplete, and aimed at producing a narrative critical of the Trump White House.
“You go up and tell the reporter, 'national security, who gave it?'” Trump told Bartiromo, adding: “You have to do that. And I suspect we'll be doing things like that.”
Of Democratic members of Congress with access to the intelligence assessment leaked to various news publications this past week, Trump added that they “should be prosecuted” for allegedly sharing parts of it with reporters.
Meanwhile, NBC News reported Friday that a senior White House official revealed plans to scale back the amount of intelligence that U.S. defense agencies and the intelligence community shares with Congress as a result of the leak.
Members of Congress including most typically the the Intelligence committees and the so-called Gang of Eight are briefed regularly on matters of national security. Congress also has the power to compel members of the government to testify.
But a compliant GOP Congress is unlikely to challenge the president on this matter. Speaker Mike Johnson backed up Trump’s calls for retribution in a statement to NBC News last week. He confirmed that he agreed with the president’s assessment that a member of Congress provided news agencies with a summary or parts of the intelligence assessment on Iran. The assessment profoundly undermines the administration’s insistences of total victory in Iran, and states instead that U.S. airstrikes on three nuclear facilities failed to destroy core components of the weapons development program, including Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium. The program, it claimed, was set back only by a few months.
Multiple administration officials including the president have insisted that this is not true, but have not provided clear evidence to show the effectiveness of U.S. strikes. Trump himself claimed that photos of blackened, scorched ground was evidence of the facilities’ total destruction.
The director of the IAEA, the U.N’s chief nuclear watchdog, further chipped away at the president’s boastings in an interview where he said that U.S. strikes had done “serious” damage to the facilities but had not eroded Iran’s production capabilities: “They can have, you know, in a matter of months, I would say, a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium.”
In his interview, Rafael Grossi added that the U.S. had not demonstrated an ability to set back Iran’s knowledge of nuclear weapons development: “There is self-evident truth that the knowledge is there...military options or not, you are not going to solve this in a definitive way militarily.”
The Financial Times also reported on Sunday that two government officials with knowledge of the intelligence were still insistent that Iran’s nuclear stockpile was not concentrated at any of the three sites during the attacks, and thus remained intact.
Trump denied that, too, on Sunday: “I don’t think they did [move the stockpile], no.”
“First of all: it’s very hard to do. It’s very dangerous to do. It’s very heavy, very, very heavy. It’s a very hard thing to do; plus, we didn’t give them much notice.”
Other experts have cautioned that more than anything, the U.S. airstrikes on June 21 likely supercharged the political will within Iran over development of a nuclear weapon as a safeguard against U.S. or Israeli military action.
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