The Trump administration is struggling to convince skeptics of its claims that U.S. strikes on Iran have toppled the country's nuclear program and wiped out ambitions to rebuild it.
In the past two days, a fiery Pentagon press conference and two classified congressional briefings have left one key question unanswered: How far was Iran's nuclear program set back?
Speaking to reporters at the White House on Friday, Trump said his claims about Iran’s nuclear sites had been “proven.”
“It’s been obliterated. It would be years before they could ever get going,” he said, adding that the Iranians are “exhausted, the last thing they’re thinking about is nuclear.”
But over on Capitol Hill, lawmakers were not convinced.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe and other top intelligence officials briefed the Senate on Thursday and the House on Friday about the June 21 strikes on the Fordow Fuel Enrichment plant, Natanz Enrichment Complex and Isfahan nuclear site.
Democrats said the meetings – which also included Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Dan Caine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth – failed to answer key questions about how much enriched uranium Iran still possessed and how long it would take for Tehran to resume its battered nuclear program.
While no one questioned that the bombing inflicted significant damage to the Iranian infrastructure required to enrich uranium, lawmakers said they were presented little evidence that the attacks would prevent Tehran from producing nuclear weapons in the future.
It’s “premature” for anyone to be claiming that Iran will not try to continue its nuclear program, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said Friday on ABC News Live, saying “there are just too many unknowns.”
Rep. Katherine Clark (Mass.), the Democratic whip, said Friday’s House briefing “left me with more concerns and a true lack of clarity on how we are defining the mission and the success of it.”
And Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.), a former nuclear physicist, said there’s no evidence that the attacks destroyed Iran’s existing stockpiles of enriched uranium. If those are intact, he warned, Iran could still produce weapons with the strength of a Hiroshima bomb in “a very small breakout time.”
Top Trump administration officials since earlier this week have been rankled by a leaked Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) preliminary summary that assessed the U.S. attacks had only set Iran’s nuclear program back several months, not by years as Trump has claimed.
The DIA found the 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs dropped on Fordow and Natanz failed to collapse the two sites’ underground buildings and that much of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium was still intact as it was moved before the bombing.
Following reports on the finding from The New York Times and CNN, Trump has taken on a combative tone, suggesting those in the U.S. intelligence world are only guessing as to how much Iran’s nuclear program has been damaged. He has also called for the reporters who obtained the report to be fired.
The DIA assessment and media reports on it also prompted Hegseth to call a rare Pentagon press conference on Thursday, during which he lambasted the media’s coverage of “the most secret and most complex military strike in history.”
But he and Caine pointedly did not offer new assessments of the true damage to Tehran’s nuclear program, instead highlighting the technical aspects of the military mission.
“You want to call it destroyed, you want to call it defeated, you want to call it obliterated, choose your word,” Hegseth said.
He also deflected questions as to whether Iran moved enriched uranium out of the Fordo site before the strike, saying that he was “not aware” of intelligence suggesting anything was “out of place.”
Satellite imagery shows trucks were present at Fordow a few days before the bombing, which experts have suggested means some of Iran’s enriched uranium was moved ahead of time.
Following the Senate’s classified briefing on Thursday, several Democrats said the intelligence presented contradicted the White House’s sweeping claims of success.
“The point is: We don’t know,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). “Anybody who says we know with certainty is making it up because we have no final battle damage assessment.”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) accused Trump of “lying to the American when he said that we had destroyed the program.”
“I have now seen a lot of the underlying intelligence. Nothing I have seen or heard has changed my belief that we have likely only set back this program by months. . . . it is probable that if Iran wants to re-establish what it had that they could do it rather quickly,” Murphy said in a video posted to X.
Even staunch Trump supporter Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was hesitant to tout the president’s message that the Iranians had given up on their nuclear program.
“The program was obliterated at those three sites, but they still have ambitions,” he told reporters. “They’re obliterated today but you can reconstitute.”
He also questioned whether hundreds of pounds of highly enriched uranium which appeared to have been moved in the days ahead of the strike was destroyed, saying “it wasn’t part of the target set.”
Sen. Tom Cotton also acknowledged that eliminating Iran’s uranium stockpile was not the mission’s focus. “It was not part of the mission to destroy all their enriched uranium or to cease it or anything else,” he said.
Foster said that’s exactly where America’s attention should be focused.
“The goal of this mission, from the start, was to secure or destroy that material,” Foster said after the House briefing. “That’s where they’re hiding the ball. And that’s what we have to keep our eyes on.”
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