US President Donald Trump has accused news outlets of committing “virtual treason” by reporting on classified American intelligence agency assessments showing that Iran has retained significant missile capabilities, contradicting triumphant White House claims that the Middle East country’s military capability has been “destroyed 100%.”
The New York Times reported Tuesday that the Trump administration’s “public portrayal of a shattered Iranian military is sharply at odds with what US intelligence agencies are telling policymakers behind closed doors, according to classified assessments from early this month that show Iran has regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers, and underground facilities.”
“Most alarming to some senior officials is evidence that Iran has restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz, which could threaten American warships and oil tankers transiting the narrow waterway,” the newspaper added.
The Times reporting came on the heels of a Washington Post story last week detailing “a confidential CIA analysis delivered to administration policymakers” concluding that Iran “can survive the US naval blockade for at least three to four months before facing more severe economic hardship.”
The Post also reported that the US intelligence community “found that Tehran retains significant ballistic missile capabilities despite weeks of intense US and Israeli bombardment.”
“Iran retains about 75% of its prewar inventories of mobile launchers and about 70% of its prewar stockpiles of missiles,” according to the Post, which cited an unnamed US official. “The official said there is evidence that the regime has been able to recover and reopen almost all of its underground storage facilities, repair some damaged missiles, and even assemble some new missiles that were nearly complete when the war began.”
In a Truth Social post late Tuesday afternoon, Trump – who has claimed that Iran has “nothing left in a military sense” – fumed that “when the Fake News says that the Iranian enemy is doing well, Militarily, against us, it’s virtual TREASON in that it is such a false, and even preposterous, statement.”
“They are aiding and abetting the enemy!” the president continued, declaring that Iran has “no Navy, their Air Force is gone, all Technology is gone, their ‘leaders’ are no longer with us, and the Country is an Economic Disaster.”
On top of intelligence assessments showing that Iran has maintained substantial military capabilities in the face of the US-Israeli onslaught, reports indicate that Iran has inflicted more damage on American military bases and other equipment than the Trump administration has publicly disclosed.
“American military bases and other equipment in the Persian Gulf region suffered extensive damage from Iranian strikes that is far worse than publicly acknowledged and is expected to cost billions of dollars to repair,” NBC News reported late last month, citing three unnamed US officials, two congressional aides, and another person familiar with the damage.
A recent Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery found that “Iranian airstrikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at US military sites across the Middle East since the war began, hitting hangars, barracks, fuel depots, aircraft, and key radar, communications, and air defense equipment,” an amount of destruction “far larger than what has been publicly acknowledged by the US government.”
Phil Gordon, a foreign policy scholar at the Brookings Institution, wrote Wednesday that, “10 weeks in, the strategic failure is undeniable” for the Trump administration in Iran.
“The risk now is that having missed the opportunity to declare victory after the first few weeks, Trump can’t accept defeat and humiliation so will keep looking for the next quick fix, thereby likely only making things worse,” Gordon warned.
The Trump administration has lashed out publicly at news outlets for reporting on assessments that run counter to the Pentagon’s rosy narrative of the illegal war’s trajectory. Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon secretary, has condemned American media outlets as “unpatriotic” and warned reporters to “think twice” before publishing classified information.
Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal revealed that the US Justice Department subpoenaed the newspaper’s journalists in March for records related to coverage of the Iran war.
“This is the latest attack in the Trump administration’s war on press freedom,” Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said in response to news of the subpoenas. “Time and again, the administration has shown itself willing to disregard the First Amendment and long-standing limits on the use of government power to go after news outlets that publish embarrassing or critical information about the government.”