Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was once again chasing leaks out of the Pentagon Wednesday, after a leaked intelligence report disputed Donald Trump’s claim that his strike on three Iranian nuclear facilities had “completely and fully obliterated” them.
At a NATO summit in The Hague Wednesday, Hegseth fumed at the media after multiple outlets reported on an early assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency that found Trump’s strike had only delayed Iran’s nuclear program by a few months.
“The instinct of CNN, the instinct of The New York Times, is to try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons, to try to hurt President Trump or our country. They don’t care what the troops think, they don’t care what the world thinks, they want to spin it, to try and make him look bad, based on a leak,” Hegseth said.
“Of course, we’ve all seen plenty of leakers, and what do leakers do? They have agendas,” he continued. “And what do they do—do they share the whole information? Or just the part that they want to introduce?”
The Pentagon has descended into utter chaos under Hegseth, who reportedly spends half of his time investigating leaks, according to one former official who was fired as part of one of those investigations.
The secretary dismissed the report as “low assessment,” meaning there was low confidence in the data. Trump, who had also taken shots at the media over the report, said the intelligence had been “very inconclusive.”
Hegseth appeared furious at the suggestion that the strikes could’ve been anything other than a success, and went so far as to suggest that it would be impossible to actually determine the damage to nuclear enrichment facilities like Fordo, which is located deep inside of a mountain.
“So, 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 told reporters Wednesday.
Hegseth announced that the Department of Defense would be coordinating on an investigation with the FBI to discover the mole, claiming that the report had been intended for “internal purposes, battle damage assessments.”
The post Pete Hegseth Spirals Over Damning Leaked Report on Trump Iran Strikes appeared first on New Republic.
