White House Says Leaked U.S. Intelligence on Iran Strikes Is ‘Flat-Out Wrong’

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt issued a sharp rebuke Tuesday of a leaked Pentagon report that said the United States’ strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend only set the country’s program back by a few months.

“🚨FAKE NEWS CNN STRIKES AGAIN: This alleged “assessment” is flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’ but was still leaked to CNN by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community,” Leavitt posted on X.

“The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program,” she continued. “Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”

The post came after CNN and The New York Times reported on an early intelligence assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s intelligence arm. According to CNN, the report found the U.S.’s strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities “did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months.”

Two people familiar with the assessment told CNN that Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile was not destroyed. One person familiar told CNN that the country’s centrifuges “are largely ‘intact’” despite the Trump administration’s strikes.

The characterization is starkly different from how President Donald Trump has been describing the strikes.

“Monumental Damage was done to all Nuclear sites in Iran, as shown by satellite images. Obliteration is an accurate term!” he wrote on Truth Social. “The white structure shown is deeply imbedded [sic] into the rock, with even its roof well below ground level, and completely shielded from flame. The biggest damage took place far below ground level. Bullseye!!!”

The strikes included seven B-2 stealth bombers, two dozen cruise missiles and 14 “bunker-buster bombs” dropped onto a deeply buried nuclear enrichment facility called Fordo. The U.S. also targeted two other facilities: Natanz and Isfahan.

Just how much the attacks set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions remains an open question. Trump has been steadfast that the strikes were damaging, as was Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who said over the weekend that the U.S. “devastated the Iranian nuclear program.”

In that same press conference, Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, agreed — but couched his statement, saying that was an initial assessment and more information was needed to determine the extent of the damages.

Iran and Israel have since come to a tentative ceasefire agreement after a chaotic early morning conflict erupted Tuesday.

Just hours earlier on Monday, Iran fired on a U.S. military base in Qatar, though the missiles were intercepted and Iran reportedly gave the U.S. a heads-up that the attack was coming. After Trump made an initial ceasefire announcement Monday night, Israel and Iran allegedly exchanged missile barrages, but the ceasefire has tentatively held since then.

Leavitt’s rebuke of the administration’s own intelligence Tuesday also comes after Trump said his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was “wrong” when she testified on Capitol Hill earlier this year that Iran wasn’t close to developing a nuclear weapon.

“I don’t care what she said, I think they were very close to having one,” Trump added.

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Nuha Dolby is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.