Former CIA Director Leon Panetta described President Trump’s recent remarks doubting the intelligence community while launching military action against Iran as “very scary” Thursday.
“It undermines the work of our intelligence professionals who really are focused on trying to provide the president with the truth — when the president questions their credibility, that certainly undermines their morale, I’m sure,” he told the London-based The i Paper.
“But secondly, it also creates a real problem for the president, because if he rejects the intelligence he’s receiving, then what will be the basis for the decisions that he makes in the future? And that is a very scary prospect,” the former Obama-era official added.
Trump repeatedly rejected Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s assessment of Tehran’s nuclear capabilities amid the recent Israel-Iran military conflict and before the U.S. bombed three of Iran’s major nuclear facilities over the weekend.
“Well, then my intelligence community is wrong,” the president told reporters Friday, when asked about Gabbard’s assessment in March that Iran was not working to build a nuclear weapon.
After Trump’s rebukes, Gabbard updated her analysis to align with the president’s.
“America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months, if they decide to finalize the assembly. President Trump has been clear that can’t happen, and I agree,” she wrote in a post on the social platform X.
The Trump administration has also rejected the Defense Intelligence Agency’s leaked initial assessment that the airstrikes set back Iran’s nuclear weapons program by only a matter of months.
“There’s no question that when the U.S. president makes a statement that our intelligence assessments are wrong and doesn’t believe our own intelligence, that creates a very dangerous moment,” Panetta, who is 86 and retired, told The i Paper.
The former CIA director, who also previously served as Defense secretary under former President Obama, said the row raises questions about “whether or not the U.S. will exercise the right kind of leadership in a dangerous world.”
“I have always been confident about our intelligence assessments with regards to Iran,” he said. “The fundamental question is: Did they make a decision to proceed with developing a weapon? And I think our intelligence indicates that that still was not the case.”
The White House didn’t immediately respond to The Hill’s request for comment on the remarks.
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