Nordwick, Netherlands
CNN
–
President Donald Trump and his top national security authorities spent most of the day in the Netherlands rebutting an early intelligence report that a weekend US strike against Iran’s nuclear facility would likely retreat for just a few months as it didn’t destroy the core elements of the country’s nuclear program.
Details of the report first reported by CNN clearly angered the President when he walked through the short NATO summit here. He first appeared on Tuesday while sitting for dinner with fellow leaders at the Royal Palace in the Netherlands.
On Wednesday, the best management staff tried to draw a more devastating picture of the strike. And White House officials say the administration will begin to restrict the sharing of confidential information with Congress, believing reports from the Pentagon’s intelligence department have leaked, and believes it is a system used to share it with the Intelligence Reporting Agency with Capitol Hill.
Trump once hoped that this week’s meeting would serve as a sort of victory lap after he managed to mediate a ceasefire between Iran and Israel two days later. And several leaders praised Trump for taking decisive action against Iran’s nuclear program. This wasn’t as clear as NATO Chief Mark Latte, who compared Trump and “daddy” efforts to end combat in the Middle East.
However, details of early reports from the Pentagon’s intelligence division still cloud the president’s various appearances. He raised the issue himself at various points, took shots in the media, and called on state and defense secretaries Marco Rubio and Pete Hegses to ease the debate before the camera. The White House even ran out a statement from Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission to strengthen their lawsuits.
Rubio and Hegses will repeat their performance on Thursday, along with Prime Minister Dan Kane and CIA Director John Ratcliffe to briefly explain the Senate on strike. The classified briefings have been postponed from Tuesday.
Later on Wednesday, Ratcliffe and other US intelligence agencies, including Director of the National Intelligence, issued their own statement that New Intelligence had discovered that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been “destroyed” and said it would take years for them to rebuild without providing evidence.
Trump on multiple points on Wednesday shouted, in his view, that he lightly meant the pilots that were bombed over the weekend. However, he also appeared eager to defend his decision to order a strike.
The president painted twice a comparison of the strike he ordered and the two nuclear bombs that the United States dropped on Japan during World War II.
“When I look at Hiroshima, when I look at Nagasaki, that too ended the war,” he said at a final press conference in The Hague. “This ended the war in a different way, but it was very devastating.”
Trump has not objected to the existence of the report. However, he stressed that the discovery that strikes likely only retreat Iran’s nuclear program every few months is “inconclusive,” and further suggested that additional information has passed that provides a more devastating likeness of damage.
A source familiar with the Intelligence Reports said that about 24 hours after the US strike, the Defense Intelligence Reports report was issued at 9pm on June 22. What is considered a “complete stage” combat damage assessment is that the assessment takes days or weeks, officials said.
The report was listed as “low confidence,” and authorities were released on Wednesday to assert their release.
At one point Wednesday, Trump acknowledged that he found the early US intelligence report ratings “potentially restricted” before adding that follow-up work was shown to have been “eliminate.”
“We’ve gathered additional intelligence. We’ve also told the site and people who saw it. The site has been wiped out and I think the nucleus is all there,” Trump tried to reject analysts who suggested that they could have moved very abundant uranium out of the site before Iran was attacked.
White House officials also took the extraordinary step of distributing statements from Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission. The strike on the FordowRenichment facility “destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and made the enrichment facility operational.”
A statement distributed by the White House before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the combination of the US bunkerbuster bomb and previous Israeli airstrikes “retreated Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons over the years.” However, Israel also publicly stated that Iran’s programme had retreated for two years before the US military operation.
Trump in the Netherlands argued that Iran’s nuclear program was so crippled by the strike that it could no longer be necessary to enter into a diplomatic agreement to curb Tehran’s ambitions.
“We may sign an agreement,” he said. “I don’t know. I don’t think it’s necessary for me. They fought wars. Now they’re back in their world. I don’t care if there’s an agreement or not.”
Still, he said meetings between the US and Iran are scheduled for next week, although the format and scope remained unknown. US and Iranian officials have maintained direct communication since the strike at Iranian nuclear facilities.
Kaitlan Collins and Kristen Holmes of CNN contributed to this report.