Pentagon Presses Iran Strike Claims as Briefed Senators Point to Unknown Effects

A day that was supposed to offer both lawmakers and the public new information to address reporting and questions about the effectiveness of the strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities ended with little progress for the Trump administration.

A Thursday morning Pentagon press conference ordered by President Donald Trump quickly turned contentious, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spending much of his time berating the press over what he felt were poor choices in coverage. Reporting emerged earlier in the week that initial assessments by the Defense Intelligence Agency found Trump's airstrikes on Iran had likely not eliminated its nuclear program and only set it back months.

Meanwhile, a closed-door classified briefing for senators on Capitol Hill ended with lawmakers saying it was still too early to know how badly Iran's nuclear program was damaged by U.S. strikes over the weekend, despite Trump's insistence that the U.S. bombs "obliterated" their targets.

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The pair of briefings came as the Trump administration seeks to discredit the early intelligence assessment, which was starkly at odds with claims made immediately after the strikes by both Trump and Hegseth.

"The news conference will prove both interesting and irrefutable," Trump said in a social media post Wednesday, referring to the public Pentagon briefing.

However, the event began with the defense secretary taking nearly 10 minutes to lambaste the press for what Hegseth claimed was an anti-military bias before passing it off to Gen. Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs chairman.

Caine then took another nearly 20 minutes to offer an argument for the mission's success that largely focused on the incredibly meticulous nature in which the bombs -- the Massive Ordnance Penetrators -- were designed specifically with the destruction of Iran's Fordo nuclear facility in mind.

Caine did not address the strikes at the other two locations of Natanz and Isfahan or the possibility that Iran had other locations or materials that could be used to continue weapons development.

The four-star general then told reporters that the mission was meticulously planned to put the bombs through the ventilation shafts at the Fordo facility and that, ultimately, the bombs "went exactly where they were intended to go."

Finally, Caine said that "we know that the trailing jets saw the first weapons function, and the pilot stated, quote, 'This was the brightest explosion that I've ever seen.'"

Still, neither Caine nor Hegseth were able to offer any direct evidence of the destruction at the Fordo facility. Trump ordered the strike on the facility -- a historic move against the U.S.' longtime foe in the region -- after Israel started a bombing campaign that triggered an Iranian retaliation.

Hegseth repeated his argument from Wednesday and told reporters that "if you want to know what's going on at Fordo, you better go there and get a big shovel, because no one's under there right now."

Caine argued that the "majority of the damage we assessed based on our extensive modeling" would have come from the bomb's blasts.

Experts were quick to note that that type of argument -- everything matched the models and plans -- is flawed.

"A strike can go 'precisely as planned' and still fail, if the model of the facility is wrong," Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, said on social media Thursday.

After briefing reporters, Hegseth and Caine, among others, then went to Capitol Hill and gave the full Senate a closed-door classified briefing.

While some of Trump's staunchest supporters in the Senate backed his claims that the facilities hit by U.S. forces were completely destroyed, even some Republicans emerged from the briefing tamping down that appraisal -- in the same breaths in which they praised the operation.

"I would just say the goals of the mission were accomplished," Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told reporters. "I don't think anybody's been underground to assess the extent of the damage, so I don't know if anybody can give you a precise number" of how long Iran's nuclear program was set back.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., similarly told reporters that "whether it is a month or a year or some other period really depends on the final battle damage assessment, which has not been done."

By contrast, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., an ardent Trump supporter and Iran hawk, was adamant that Iran's nuclear program has been hampered for years.

"They blew these places up in a major league way," Graham said.

In the public briefing, Hegseth was quick to point to intelligence assessments from both the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence released Wednesday that cited "new intelligence" that the facilities in Iran were destroyed. Neither statement, however, offered any details about the new intelligence, and Hegseth wouldn't commit to making it public.

Yet when a reporter asked Hegseth whether he felt the public needed to see the intelligence being cited, he countered: "Do you have a top secret clearance, sir?"

Also left unanswered was whether the Trump administration was factoring in reports that Iran removed all of its enriched uranium from the targeted locations before the U.S. strikes.

Hegseth, when asked, said only that he was "not aware of any intelligence ... that says things were not where they were supposed to be, moved or otherwise."

Notably, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was not one of the briefers for the Senate session. In addition to Hegseth and Caine, senators heard from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.

The same slate of officials is scheduled to brief the House on Friday morning, when they are likely to face similar skepticism and questions as they did from senators.

"I walk away from that briefing still under the belief that we have not obliterated the program," Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said Thursday. "The president was deliberately misleading the public when he said the program was obliterated. It is certain that there is still significant capability and significant equipment that remain."

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