After President Donald Trump’s decision to strike three Iranian nuclear facilities on Saturday, administration officials are barely bothering to pretend the unprecedented — and potentially calamitous — attacks were motivated by new intelligence suggesting Iran was on the brink of having nuclear weapons.
Just months ago, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified to Congress, in her opening statement, that the U.S. intel community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” and had not reauthorized its nuclear weapons program.
While Trump recently publicly disputed Gabbard’s testimony, according to two administration officials with knowledge of internal deliberations in recent weeks, the president’s decision to strike was not driven by any new U.S. intelligence on Iran.
“There is no intel,” says one of the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “Nothing new, that I’m aware of… The president is protecting the United States and our interests, [but] the intelligence assessments have not really changed from what they were before.”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, confirmed Saturday night that American intelligence assessments on Iran have not changed. “I was briefed on the intelligence last week. Iran posed no imminent threat of attack to the United States,” he wrote on social media. “Iran was not close to building a deliverable nuclear weapon.”
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly says, “This is false and lazy ‘reporting’ designed to undermine President Trump’s highly successful operation to dismantle Iran’s nuclear capabilities.”
Trump’s attacks on Iran constitute an act of war — and could set off a new, long-term conflict with potential to grow into something much larger. Unlike a previous time an American president preemptively initiated a war in the Middle East, when George W. Bush plunged America into a disastrous war in Iraq, he and his team spent roughly a year building a case of lies and propaganda to sell to a public that was already broadly supportive of post-9/11 military action.
The second Trump administration skipped the pretense, opting to speed-run the U.S. into conflict, at a time when public polling shows that the idea of war with Iran is spectacularly unpopular with the American people.
In his address to the nation Saturday evening, Trump said, “Our objective was the destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world’s number one state sponsor of terror.”
Trump did not claim on Saturday that he launched the attacks because Iran was close to having a nuclear weapon — as he had suggested earlier in the week. “I think they were very close to having one,” the president said Tuesday, as he disputed Gabbard’s testimony to Congress.
The Trump administration has since attempted to recast Gabbard’s comments before Congress, because, after she said Iran was “not building a nuclear weapon,” she had added: “Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”
Gabbard posted on X on Friday, “The dishonest media is intentionally taking my testimony out of context and spreading fake news as a way to manufacture division. 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.”
“As the president and White House officials have said many, many times, U.S. intelligence showed Iran had all it needed to build a nuclear weapon,” Kelly says. She points to a statement earlier this month from U.S. Central Command chief Gen. Michael Kurilla, who asserted that Iran’s “current [uranium] stockpiles and the available centrifuges across several enrichment plants are sufficient to produce its first 25 kg of weapons-grade materials in roughly one week and enough for up to 10 nuclear weapons in three weeks.”
The attacks on Iran represent both a major escalation and a rapid shift in posture toward Iran. Not long ago, Trump was working to negotiate a nuclear agreement with Iran — a development that was somewhat ironic given Trump had withdrawn from Barack Obama’s Iran deal in his first term as president.
Across the federal government, senior officials and policymakers aren’t pretending that Trump’s claims of an imminent nuclear threat are built on anything but vibes, whether intentionally manufactured or not.
During a press conference Sunday morning, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked whether the U.S. had new intelligence suggesting Iran had been attempting to build nuclear weapons.
“I would just simply say that the president’s made it very clear he’s looked at all of this — all of the intelligence, all the information — and come to the conclusion that the Iranian nuclear program is a threat,” Hegseth said.
Appearing on Meet the Press on Sunday, Vice President J.D. Vance was asked whether Trump had moved to attack Iran based on U.S. intelligence or rather intel provided by Israel, which has been attacking Iranian nuclear and military sites, officials, and scientists since June 13.
“Of course, we share intelligence with a lot of agencies, British, Israeli and so forth, but it was our intelligence that motivated us to act,” Vance said, before quickly pivoting.
“The thing that I would really emphasize is the way in which the Iranians seem to be stonewalling us,” he said. “That was not, by the way, our consensus back in March of this year, we saw the Iranians making some concessions. We thought the conversations were actually productive. By mid-May, everybody in our intelligence community and the president’s senior team looked at ourselves and said, the Iranians are not being serious. … If you believe, as we did, that the Iranians are rushing towards a nuclear weapons program while simultaneously refusing to negotiate, how can we do anything but take serious action against this program?”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio was pressed on Face the Nation on Sunday to say whether the U.S. had seen intelligence showing that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had ordered the country to make nuclear weapons.
“That’s irrelevant,” Rubio said, saying it didn’t matter if such an order was given. “They have everything they need for a nuclear weapon,” he added.
