Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Bradley Moss: Absolutely. Anytime, Greg.
Moss: Sure. The DIA, or the Defense Intelligence Agency, is basically the military’s version of the CIA. It’s the redheaded stepchild. It has fewer resources than CIA. It’s less glamorous in its mission operations than CIA. But it serves that role for the Defense Department in a manner distinct from what CIA does. And the role they particularly had here was to compile this initial assessment. And let’s be very clear: This is just the initial assessment. It’s still classified top secret, which means the unauthorized release of it could cause exceptionally grave damage to national security. It’s still official government assessment. It’s still something that the DIA would present to policymakers, both within DOD, such as Secretary Hegseth, as well as all the way up to the president himself to consider when assessing next steps and how to decide where they want to go from a policy standpoint. That’s the nature. That’s the basis of intelligence assessment. You get your initial information and then you continue to update it as you go along.
Moss: It’s a very serious document and it’s supposed to be strictly based on the facts of what they have at the moment. So with an initial assessment like this—something they’re rating [or] what is called “low confidence”—it means they’re just going off the basics of what they can easily get. Satellite imagery, anything they’ve caught on intercepts, chatter along those lines. It’s not going to be into the ground, into the literal mud and into the literal dirt of the explosions yet. They don’t have that information yet. It may take a while for them to truly find out how much damage was caused at that level. But this information is absolutely the type of initial assessment that the government would rely upon. Let’s say if they decided they need to do a second round of strikes. You’d be relying on something like this to inform the policymakers and ultimately informing the president of, Do you need to authorize a second strike, a third strike? You’re not going to have that detailed assessment yet. That takes weeks.
Moss: Presidents since the dawn of the modern American military and modern defense apparatus have relied upon initial assessments like this. They’ve put out information to the media. The media has scrutinized and gone to see if there was more detail to it since the dawn of that era going back to World War I and World War II. And we’ve been able to do it without this insanity and the overblown exaggerations you see with Donald Trump. But with him, everything has to be amazing. It has to be the biggest explosion you’ve ever seen. It has to be the most amazing head-turning destruction you’ve ever seen. People have to be lining up to tell him with tears in their eyes that it was so amazing [and] they’ve never seen anybody do anything like it before.
Sargent: Absolutely. And his own advisors, the tone that they’re setting is taken straight from the top. We had Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth unleash this disgusting rant blaming the media for reporting on this assessment at all and blaming people in the intelligence agencies for leaking it. Listen to this.
Sargent: The way Hegseth uses the troops to disparage basic truth seeking by the free press is just despicable. And the idea that he cares about how this reflects on the troops when all he really gives a shit about is how it makes Trump appear is just laughable. That little show was for Trump, who was standing right next to him, and only for Trump. But Brad, you’re a deep-state denizen. What would actually be behind a leak like this? Would it really be about hurting Trump, which again is the only thing they care about? Or would it be more about trying to get the truth out there? What do you think went into this leak?
Whether or not that person will ultimately be caught and be punished, it’s entirely possible. Look no further than Reality Winner and what she did during the first Trump administration. She paid for her leak of a single document—which she had done for purposes of transparency, but she also was not a political fan of the president. But she did it for purposes of transparency. She went to jail. That’s the reality of what could possibly happen here. I certainly get, from a national security standpoint, the president, the secretary of defense denouncing the leak in general. Any president is going to do that. Any secretary of defense is going to do that.
Sargent: Exactly. There’s a through line to a lot of this that you got out there, Brad. Let’s listen to some more audio. This one of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Sargent: Naturally, she has to go hard into the totalitarian propaganda and depict this as the greatest thing any American president has ever done. But that aside, note that she attacks unnamed intelligence officials for the leak, just as Hegseth did. Brad, are we going to see a real purge here, do you think?
Sargent: I want to ask you about that. Can you give us a little insight into what’s going to unfold now with regard to the assessments? When do we start to see other assessments? And is there a serious danger that those will be distorted and politicized? It’s hard to imagine given the explosive rage that was directed at this one assessment that this administration will ever officially put out anything that isn’t 100 percent flattering to Trump. Or am I wrong there? Can we trust the process or not?
The bigger concern here now on Earth 1 with Donald Trump as president again and with total immunity is that there is going to be a concerted effort to make sure whatever information gets compiled and ultimately documented in the subsequent assessments and is put forth as the official position of DOD, the intelligence community writ large, etc., is going to be premised not on the totality and entirety of the information but on what is politically advantageous to Donald Trump and what fits his political narrative. Will that process be allowed to play out to showcase the actual facts, or is it just going to have to be something that says Donald Trump was right from the beginning, the original assessment was garbage, and he is the greatest president in human history? That’s got to be a concern. And this is, in a normal world, what Congress would be worried about because their war powers are implicated and they are supposed to be the ones who conduct that kind of oversight.
Moss: Yeah. That was always a concern, especially with the second term. The first term, it was a very different Congress. It was a very different Trump administration in the White House. He didn’t have his own people really yet. He wasn’t expecting to win the first time. He was staffed by all kinds of what I would call more or less establishment people. Even if they were far more conservative than anything Hillary Clinton would have had, you had the Mattises, you had the Barrs, you had people like that you could trust at least understood the process. And he had Congress, which wasn’t beholden to him. Now it is his party. It is his people only, and they are true believers.
Sargent: Well, it’s interesting that you bring up the role of Congress here because some senior Democrats are trying to inject their voices into this and say take this document seriously. Karoline Leavitt had a tweet today where she said something like “the greatest president in all of human history,” “world historical figure,” “totally obliterated the nuclear program,” using exactly the language that Trump wants her to use and so forth. Representative Ted Lieu, who’s in the Democratic leadership, tweeted the following quote, “I highly recommend you read the assessment before you say or post anything else on this topic.” Now, Brad, how do you read that? That’s a serious Democrat trying to let the world know that the administration is gaslighting people about what this classified document really says, right? Lieu gets to read it.
Sargent: Well, just to close this out on some comic relief, I want to underscore how absurd all this is. The New York Times reported that since Trump started to use the term “obliterated” to describe what his bombing did to Iran’s nuclear program, he has actually been monitoring other officials to be sure they’re using that exact language. And right on cue, Leavitt tweeted out a bunch of statements from numerous administration officials. And you know what? Every one of the statements had the word “obliterated” in it. Where do we go with something like this? How do you predict that this all unfolds from here on out, given the deeply cult-like nature of all this?
Sargent: There’s just no conception of the public good at all operating with any of these people. It’s all about Donald Trump and anyone who tries to go out there and seek facts like the free press is doing, right? Trying to inform the public about whether a major operation by Donald Trump worked. That has to just be only about Trump as well, right? Only in a negative way. That to me is what we’re really seeing here. It’s an ethic that’s just deeply destructive to any understanding of governance as we should hope it should be.
Sargent: No question, although it really is interesting how incredibly damaging the facts that were put out in this report have been to Trump. There comes a point when all the TikToking and all the tweeting and all that stuff just breaks down in the face of reality.
Sargent: Bradley Moss, thank you so much for creeping out of the bowels of the deep state to talk to us, man. It was super illuminating. We really appreciate your time.
Sargent: Good to talk to you, Brad.
Moss: Take it easy.
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