President Trump is going to extraordinary lengths to defend his claim that U.S. airstrikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, determined to cement the operation as a defining victory of his presidency.
Why it matters: Trump has staked his credibility — and major parts of his foreign policy legacy — on the success of Saturday’s military intervention, which punctuated decades of U.S. debate over the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran.
- He has treated the leak of an initial Pentagon battle damage assessment as an act of sabotage, launching an aggressive campaign to discredit the report as preliminary, inaccurate, and already outdated.
- Critics have accused Trump of politicizing intelligence and pressuring officials to make an assessment that may be premature — or at least more nuanced than the president claims.
Driving the news: Trump announced that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and top Pentagon officials will hold a “major news conference” at 8 a.m. ET Thursday to defend the “Great American Pilots” who carried out “a perfect mission.”
- The administration has accused the media of unpatriotic behavior for reporting skeptically on the Iran strike, even while acknowledging the initial assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency was real.
- The FBI has launched an investigation into the breach, and the administration plans to limit sharing classified information with Congress to crack down on leakers, as Axios first reported.
- At Trump’s NATO press conference in the Netherlands, he publicly reprimanded the analysts who prepared the report — claiming it “wasn’t finished” and should have been withheld until they actually “knew the answer.”
Zoom in: The messaging campaign has become a whole-of-government priority.
- Hegseth and national security adviser Marco Rubio stepped forward at NATO to denounce attempts by leakers to “spin” the intelligence, stressing that the early assessment was labeled “low confidence.”
- Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard — whom Trump criticized last week over her Iran assessment to Congress — said Wednesday that “new intelligence confirms” that Iran’s nuclear facilities have been “destroyed” and will take “years” to rebuild.
- CIA Director John Ratcliffe cited a new “body of credible intelligence,” including “historically reliable” sources and methods, that shows Iran’s nuclear program has been “severely damaged.”
The intrigue: Trump has solicited backup from Israel — and even pointed to statements from Iran — to validate his narrative and undercut the Pentagon’s early intelligence.
- While Trump spoke at NATO, the White House circulated a short statement attributed to the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission that said the U.S. strike on Iran’s fortified nuclear facility in Fordow “destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable.”
- It was highly unusual for the White House to release a statement on behalf of an Israeli security agency — and it took another 30 minutes before the Israeli prime minister’s office distributed it to the press.
Between the lines: The Israeli statement assessed that the combination of U.S. and Israeli strikes “has set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years.”
- It noted that this situation could continue “indefinitely” as long as Iran “does not get access to nuclear material” buried under the rubble at the bombed nuclear sites.
- The statement was much closer in tone and substance to Trump’s position than the DIA report — but it stopped short of claiming Iran’s nuclear program has been “obliterated.”
- That didn’t stop Trump from posting on Truth Social: “Israel just stated that the Nuclear Sites were OBLITERATED!”
State of play: An Israeli intelligence official told Axios that while Trump shouldn’t have used such definitive language, the emerging intelligence picture is much closer to his version of events than the initial DIA assessment suggested.
- On Wednesday, Trump got another boost from IDF Chief of Staff Gen. Eyal Zamir, who — while stopping short of declaring the Iranian nuclear program “obliterated” — emphasized that it had suffered a severe, systemic blow.
- “We struck the main facilities, factories, industries, and centers of knowledge,” Zamir said, citing senior officials in the IDF Intelligence Directorate and Israeli nuclear experts.
- “The cumulative achievement makes it possible to state that the Iranian nuclear project has suffered severe, extensive, and deep damage and has been set back by years.”
