U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced Wednesday that the FBI has launched an internal investigation to identify the individual responsible for leaking a classified assessment on the impact of U.S. airstrikes on Iran to the media.
The move follows a CNN report on Tuesday detailing a preliminary U.S. intelligence assessment which found that the deployment of 14 “bunker buster” bombs on three Iranian nuclear enrichment sites may have delayed Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months. The White House quickly pushed back on that report, describing the assessment as a worst-case scenario and vowing to take decisive action against the source of the leak.
Hegseth said the Pentagon, working alongside the FBI, will investigate who had access to the report produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency. “When you talk to people who built the bombs, understand what those bombs can do and deliver those bombs, they landed precisely where they were supposed to,” Hegseth said in a post-attack interview.
“So it was a flawless mission … Any assessment that tells you something otherwise is speculating with other motives. And we know that because when you actually look at the report — by the way, it was a top secret report — it was preliminary, it was low confidence. All right. … And we believe far more likely severe and obliterated. So this is a political motive here,” he added.
“Of course, we’re doing a leak investigation with the FBI right now because this information is for internal purposes. Battle damage assessments,” Hegseth added. “And CNN and others are trying to spin it to make the president look bad when this was an overwhelming success.”
His rebuttal of CNN’s report was echoed by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who criticized the leaker as an “anonymous, low-level loser” and condemned the unauthorized disclosure.
“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 noted on the X platform. “Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”
The intelligence assessment is at odds with another by the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, which said the U.S. strike on Iran’s underground Fordow facility “destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable,” CNN reported.
Israeli officials also told the outlet they believe the joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes have set Iran’s nuclear program back by at least two years—assuming Iran can rebuild without interference, a scenario Israel says it will not permit.
