President Donald Trump and his top national security officials spent much of their day in the Netherlands working to rebut an early intelligence report that assessed weekend US strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months.
The details of the report, which were first reported by CNN, clearly angered the president as he made his way through a brief NATO summit here. They first emerged as he was sitting down for dinner on Tuesday with fellow leaders at a Dutch royal palace, where he was invited to spend the night.
On Wednesday, top administration officials tried to paint a more devastating picture of the strikes. And a senior White House official said the administration would begin to limit its sharing of classified information with Congress, believing the report from the Pentagon’s intelligence arm was leaked after it was posted to CAPNET, a system used for sharing intelligence with Capitol Hill.
Trump had once hoped this week’s conference might act as something of a victory lap following the strikes and his success in brokering a ceasefire between Iran and Israel two days later. And several leaders lavished praise on Trump for taking decisive action against Iran’s nuclear program, none more vividly than the NATO chief Mark Rutte, who compared Trump to “daddy” for his efforts to end the fighting in the Middle East.
Yet details in the early report from the Pentagon’s intelligence arm still clouded the president’s various appearances. He raised the matter himself at various points, taking shots at the media and calling on his secretaries of State and Defense, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, to buffer his arguments before the cameras. The White House even trotted out a statement from Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission to bolster their case.
Rubio and Hegseth will likely repeat their performance on Thursday when they, alongside Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, brief the Senate on the strikes. The classified briefings had been postponed from Tuesday.
Later Wednesday, other US intelligence officials — including Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard — released their own statements saying new intelligence had found the Iranian nuclear facilities had been “destroyed” and would take years to rebuild, without providing evidence.
Trump at multiple points on Wednesday fumed that, in his view, the information demeaned the pilots who flew the bombing run over the weekend. But he also appeared eager to defend his decision to order the strikes, which was opposed by some members of his own party.
The president twice drew a comparison between the strikes he’d ordered and the two nuclear bombs the United States dropped on Japan during World War II, saying both had been effective in ending wars.
“If you look at Hiroshima or if you look at Nagasaki, you know, that ended a war too,” he told a final press conference in The Hague. “This ended a war in a different way, but it was so devastating.”
Trump has not disputed the report’s existence. But he has emphasized that its finding that the strikes likely only set back Iran’s nuclear program by months was “inconclusive,” and suggested additional information had come through that provides a fuller, more devastating portrait of the damage.
A source familiar with the intelligence said the Defense Intelligence Agency report was issued on June 22 at 9 p.m. ET, roughly 24 hours after the US strikes. What is considered a “full phase” battle damage assessment requires days or weeks to assess, officials have said.
The report was listed as “low-confidence,” which officials affirmed in public on Wednesday as they decried its release.
At one point on Wednesday, Trump conceded that early US intelligence assessments found the damage “could be limited,” before adding that follow-up work showed it was “obliterated.”
“We’ve collected additional intelligence. We’ve also spoken to people who have seen the site and the site is – the site is obliterated, and we think everything nuclear is down there,” Trump said, attempting to rebuff analysts who suggest Iran may have moved its highly enriched uranium out of the sites before the US strikes.
White House officials also took the unusual step of distributing the statement from Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission saying the strike on the Fordow enrichment facility “destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable.”
The statement — which the White House distributed even before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office — said the combination of the American bunker-buster bombs and earlier Israeli airstrikes “has set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years.” But Israel had also stated publicly before the US military operation that Iran’s program had been set back by two years.
Trump asserted in the Netherlands that Iran’s nuclear program had been so crippled by the strikes that it may no longer be necessary to strike a diplomatic agreement to curb Tehran’s ambitions.
“We may sign an agreement,” he said. “I don’t know. To me, I don’t think it’s that necessary. I mean they had a war they fought. Now they’re going back to their world. I don’t care if I have an agreement or not.”
Still, he said talks were scheduled between the US and Iran for next week, though the format and scope were left unclear. American and Iranian officials have kept up direct communication since the strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and Kristen Holmes contributed to this report.
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