Iran nuclear program severely broken

CIA Director John Ratcliffe said Wednesday that Iran‘s nuclear program “has been severely damaged” by recent strikes on its key enrichment facilities, and pushed back on reporting about an initial U.S. intelligence report that suggests otherwise.

Ratcliffe’s statement does not specifically mention U.S. bombs when he says that “recent, targeted strikes” destroyed the Iranian targets, so it was unclear if was also including the impact of a week of strikes by Israel’s military.

He cited “a body of credible intelligence,” including “new intelligence from an historically reliable and accurate source/method” as factors in the spy agency’s assessment that “several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years.”

The statement came hours after President Donald Trump doubled down on his administration’s claim that U.S. bomb strikes over the weekend “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program.

Ratcliffe delivered his statement via social media, where he wrote that the CIA assessment “contradicts illegally sourced public reporting regarding the destruction of key Iranian nuclear facilities.”

Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, wrote on X later Wednesday that “new intelligence” confirms Trump’s claim that “Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed.”

“If the Iranians chose to rebuild, they would have to rebuild all three facilities (Natanz, Fordow, Esfahan) entirely, which would likely take years to do,” wrote Gabbard.

She also accused “the propaganda media” of distorting “illegally leaked classified intelligence assessments” in order to “try to undermine President Trump’s decisive leadership.”

The statements from Ratcliffe and Gabbard were the latest moves in the Trump administration’s full-bore effort to undermine any reporting that does not support the president’s description of what the U.S. military achieved in the Middle East.

Late Wednesday, Trump announced that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other military officials will hold a news conference Thursday morning at 8 a.m. ET, “in order to fight for the Dignity of our Great American Pilots.”

Speaking at a NATO Summit in The Hague, Netherlands, earlier Wednesday, Trump aggressively lashed out at journalists who first reported on the Defense Intelligence Agency’s initial assessment that American strikes had not completely destroyed their targets.

That assessment found that the bombings likely set Iran’s nuclear program back by a few months, but not by years.

The report itself has not been made public. But it was described to journalists by people familiar with it, including NBC News. The assessment was first reported Tuesday afternoon by CNN.

“The report said what it said, and it was fine,” Trump told reporters at The Hague, after defending his claim that Iran’s nuclear capabilities were “obliterated” by U.S. strikes.

The damage to Iranian sites “was severe, they think, but they had no idea. They shouldn’t have issued a report until they did,” Trump said.

The president also suggested that the data which informed the DIA assessment had been insufficient.

“They did a report, but it was like, if you look at the dates, it’s just a few days after, so they didn’t see” the sites, Trump said.

“The report was not a complete report,” he added.

The Pentagon has launched a “leak investigation” with the FBI, Hegseth said Wednesday. He also noted that the report was preliminary and had been labeled “low confidence.”

Speaking alongside Trump at the NATO news conference, Hegseth criticized “fake news” and defended the strikes.

“If you want to make an assessment of what happened at Fordo, you better get a big shovel and go really deep, because Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated,” he said.

The White House also sent reporters a screenshot of a statement from Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission, declaring that the U.S. strike on Fordo “destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable.”

Back in Washington, Ratcliffe, Gabbard and other top officials, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine and deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, had been scheduled to participate in classified briefings Tuesday for Congress, NBC reported.

But that same morning, both briefings were abruptly postponed. The Senate briefing was rescheduled for Thursday, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said his chamber’s briefing will be held Friday.

But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Wednesday that the lineup of people briefing the senators had been changed at the last minute.

Now only Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are slated to brief senators on Thursday, he said.

“Sending intelligence officers to briefings in Congress is a long standing bipartisan practice,” Schumer said on the Senate floor.

If Hegseth and Rubio are “the only ones in attendance, they will only parrot whatever the president wants them to say,” he said.

“Congress is entitled, as the representatives of the American people, to hear from the administration about matters of national intelligence and national security,” said Schumer.