President Donald Trump on Wednesday doubled down on his claim that U.S. bomb strikes completely destroyed Iran’s nuclear program, and he bristled at the attention being paid to an initial American intelligence report that suggests otherwise.
“It’s been obliterated, totally obliterated,” Trump said of the Iranian nuclear site at Fordo during a press conference, before he departed a NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands.
A preliminary U.S. intelligence assessment, however, found that America’s airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear sites did not completely destroy those facilities.
Rather, the U.S. bombings likely set Iran’s nuclear program back by a few months, not years, according to the assessment, which was first reported by CNN and matched by other outlets including NBC News.
Trump on Wednesday acknowledged the existence of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s report, which has not been made public but has been described to journalists by people familiar with it. But he suggested the data that informed it was insufficient.
