Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed on Wednesday that Iran is “much further away from a nuclear weapon” following President Donald Trump’s military strikes against the Middle Eastern nation’s three major nuclear facilities.
In a Wednesday interview with Politico at the NATO summit in the Netherlands, Rubio rejected a CNN report that claimed an early U.S. intelligence report indicated that Iran’s nuclear facilities at Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz were not totally destroyed in the U.S. military strikes on Saturday.
“The bottom line is, they are much further away from a nuclear weapon today than they were before the president took this bold action,” Rubio told Politico. “That’s the most important thing to understand — significant, very significant, substantial damage was done to a variety of different components, and we’re just learning more about it.”
According to Politico, the secretary of state’s comments come after CNN reported that a preliminary report by the Defense Intelligence Agency suggested that the U.S. military strikes ordered by the president only caused enough damage to delay Iran’s nuclear program by a matter of months.
READ MORE: Videos: Iran’s nuclear program set back ‘decades,’ Trump says
“I hate commenting on these stories, because often the first story is wrong and the person putting it out there has an agenda,” Rubio told Politico. “That story is a false story, and it’s one that really shouldn’t be rereported because it doesn’t accurately reflect what’s happening.”
CNN’s report casting doubt on the effectiveness of the Trump administration’s strikes against Iran was also previously dismissed Tuesday by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
“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 tweeted. “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.”
Leavitt added, “Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”
Trump told reporters on Wednesday that the military strikes against Iran’s three main nuclear facilities set the country’s nuclear program back by “decades.”
“It’s gone for years, years, very tough to rebuild, because the whole thing is collapsed,” Trump said. “In other words, inside, it’s all collapsed.”
