Politics
BREAKING: New Intel Shuts Down CNN, Vindicates Trump On Iran Strikes: ‘Many Years’
A new military assessment contradicting reporting by CNN about the damage done to Iran’s nuclear capabilities is vindicating officials at the White House, where President Donald Trump insists that a cascade of bombs has “obliterated” their targets.
Iran’s nuclear enrichment program has been set back by “many years,” according to the Israel Atomic Energy Commission. Their conclusion comes after President Trump revealed that Israel put soldiers on the grounds of the three Iranian sites to assess the damage firsthand.
“The devastating U.S. strike on Fordow destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable,” the commission said in a statement the White House provided to Fox News Wednesday. “We assess that the American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, combined with Israeli strikes on other elements of Iran’s military nuclear program, has set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years,” it said.
“This achievement can continue indefinitely if Iran does not get access to nuclear material,” the statement added.
The Israeli commission contradicts an earlier assessment by the U.S. intelligence community that 14 “bunker buster” bombs only damaged Iran’s three sites enough to set its program back “several months.”
Trump, speaking from a NATO summit in the Netherlands, doubled down on his claim that the bombing accomplished a “total obliteration” of all three sites.
“It was obliteration. And you’ll see that — and it’s going to come out. Israel is doing a report on it now, I understand. And I was told that they said it was total obliteration. You know, they have guys that go in there after the hit, and they said it was total obliteration,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday.
“It’s very tough to rebuild because the whole thing has collapsed,” Trump said in reference to Iran’s underground Fordow facility. “In other words, inside it’s all collapsed. Nobody can get in to see it because it’s collapsed. You can’t go in to see a room that has, you know, 10 million tons of rock in it. And the tunnels are totally collapsed.”
WATCH:
Israeli intelligence officials also said it was too soon to draw comprehensive conclusions about the extent of damage done to the facility in Fordow, which is buried dozens of meters beneath concrete and mountainside.
“A professional battle damage assessment takes time,” an official told Axios.
“Israeli intelligence services haven’t arrived at any bottom lines for now,” they added. “But we don’t think there was any bug in the operation, and we have no indications the bunker-buster bombs didn’t work. Nobody here is disappointed.”
The CNN report has kicked a hornet’s nest at the White House, where officials have fallen in line behind the president and insisted that the bombs “obliterated” their targets while attempting to turn the media’s focus toward finding the leaker of the confidential U.S. assessment.
In a blistering, all-caps statement on Truth Social, Trump accused CNN and the New York Times of “teaming up… to demean one of the most successful military strikes in history.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on Wednesday that the Pentagon and FBI are conducting an investigation to determine the source of the leak.
“Of course, we’re doing a leak investigation with the FBI right now because this information is for internal purposes. Battle damage assessments,” Hegseth told reporters. “And CNN and others are trying to spin it to make the president look bad when this was an overwhelming success.”
