Donald Trump threatened to force journalists to reveal sources who leaked a Pentagon intelligence assessment that concluded the U.S. air strikes on Iran only set the nation’s nuclear program back “months,” contradicting administration claims that the facilities were “obliterated.”
“You tweeted the Democrats leaked an intelligence [report],” Sunday Morning Futures host Maria Bartiromo said to Trump in an interview.
“They should be prosecuted,” the president responded.
When Bartiromo asked “who, specifically” should be prosecuted, Trump did not name any names but said his administration would demand reporters reveal the sources of their reporting.
“We can find out. If they want to, we can find out easily. You go up and tell the reporter, ‘National security, who gave it [to you]?’ You have to do that, and I suspect we’ll be doing things like that,” he said.
Demanding reporters reveal confidential sources is a dangerous path that could quickly escalate to prosecuting reporters who refuse to disclose them.
Both CNN and The New York Times ran stories that undermined the administration’s narrative, citing an assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, that found the bombings sealed off entrances to two targeted facilities but left the underground buildings intact. Prior to the attacks, the DIA believed Iran was potentially three months away from making a nuclear bomb. After the attacks, it estimated the program had been set back less than six months. The report additionally stated that Iran had relocated a significant portion of its enriched uranium to classified locations before the U.S. attacks. Iranian officials have publicly stated that the uranium was moved before the strikes.
Trump and the White House, however, have publicly claimed the mission was a “spectacular military success” that “completely and totally obliterated” key nuclear enrichment facilities and uranium supplies.
On Fox News, Trump said that Iran couldn’t have moved its uranium because it would be “very hard to do” and the uranium was “very, very heavy.”
“I think, first of all, it’s very hard to do. It’s very dangerous to do,” Trump said. “It’s very heavy, very, very heavy. It’s a very hard thing to do. Plus, we didn’t give much notice because they didn’t know we were coming until just, you know, then.”
Since the leak of the DIA report’s conclusions, Trump has doubled down on his claims Iran’s nuclear capabilities were destroyed and vented his increasing frustration that not everyone is buying his narrative. He has called the reports “fake news,” accusing the media outlets of having “[made] up a phony story to get some hits.”
“The bomb went through [the nuclear facility] like it was butter, like it was absolute butter,” Trump said.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said that the Department of Defense has launched “a leak investigation with the FBI right now because this information is for internal purposes, battle damage assessments.”
“They did obliterate it, it turned out,” Trump told Bartiromo, insisting Iran’s nuclear capabilities were destroyed. “We had to suffer the fake news with the fake news of CNN and The New York Times, [which were] saying, well, maybe it wasn’t as good as Trump said. Maybe it wasn’t totally obliterated.”
“It turned out, no, it was obliterated like nobody’s ever seen before,” he continued. “And that meant the end to their nuclear ambitions, at least for a period of time.”
Since the strikes, Trump has called for Israel and Iran to make peace. “We basically have two countries that are fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” he said last week, frustrated that the two sides have not brokered a deal to stop the escalation.
Trump is eager to claim victory in Iran and end the fighting, perhaps because he has his eye on snagging himself a Nobel Peace Prize, a longtime obsession.
