Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday unloaded on the press amid reports that an internal U.S. assessment found American strikes set back Iran’s nuclear program by months, not years, dismissing it as “preliminary” and “low confidence.”
Trump invited Hegseth to address questions about the assessment near the end of a roughly 45-minute press conference at the NATO summit in the Netherlands, which focused largely on U.S. strikes against Iran carried out on Saturday.
Hegseth accused media outlets that reported on the internal U.S. assessment of trying “to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons to try to hurt President Trump or our country.”
“They don’t care what the troops think. They don’t are what the world thinks. They want to spin it to try to make him look bad based on a leak,” Hegseth added.
Hegseth described the assessment as a “preliminary report that’s deemed to be a low assessment. You know what a low assessment means? Low confidence in the data in that report.”
“If you want to make an assessment of what happened at Fordow, you better get a big shovel and go really deep,” Hegseth said, referring to one of the nuclear facilities targeted by the U.S. “Because Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated…Those that dropped the bombs precisely in the right place know exactly what happened when that exploded. And you know who else knows? Iran.”
Hegseth’s vigorous defense echoed Trump, who has attacked media outlets in the wake of reports about the U.S. intelligence assessment.
Trump and the White House on Wednesday touted an assessment from the Israel Atomic Energy Commission about the success of the U.S. strikes on the Iranian nuclear facilities, which, together with Israeli strikes, set back Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon “by many years.”
Trump administration officials and experts have acknowledged it may take days to fully determine the extent of the damage. The president on Wednesday also dismissed reports that Iran had moved significant amounts of its enriched uranium ahead of the attack.
“We think we hit them so hard and so fast they didn’t get a chance to move,” Trump said.
