President Donald Trump stated that the individual responsible for leaking the low-confidence Defense Intelligence Agency report on the U.S. strike against Iranian nuclear facilities “should be prosecuted.”
A leaked report claimed that the U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities delayed the country’s program by only a few months. However, U.S. officials have maintained that the sites were destroyed and would take years for Iran to rebuild.
Outlets such as CNN and The New York Times published details from the leaked assessment, but without noting that intelligence officials had “low confidence” in its findings. Trump suggested that, for national security reasons, journalists who reported on the leaked intelligence should be compelled to disclose their sources.
“They should be prosecuted,” the president said on Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo when asked about finding who was behind the leak.
“We can find out. If they want to, we can find out easily. You go up and tell the reporter, ‘National security, who gave it [to you]?’ You have to do that, and I suspect we’ll be doing things like that,” he added.
Dan Shapiro, former U.S. ambassador to Israel and deputy assistant secretary of Defense for the Middle East, said he places little weight on early assessments that are either overly pessimistic or overly optimistic. He noted that the initial report from the Defense Intelligence Agency was likely based primarily on satellite imagery, Fox News reported Sunday.
“That’s one piece of the puzzle of how you would really make this assessment,” Shapiro, now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told Fox News Digital. “You’d really want to have to test all the other streams of intelligence, from signals intelligence, human intelligence, other forms of monitoring the site, potentially visits by International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, potentially visits by other people. So that’s going to take days to weeks to get a real assessment.”
He added: “But I think it’s likely that if the munitions performed as expected, that significant damage was done, and would set back the program significantly.”
Retired Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, who formerly served as director for transnational threats at the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton, said that the “low confidence” label is commonly applied to early intelligence assessments.
“Low confidence means the analyst is not sure of the accuracy of their assessment,” said Montgomery, now a senior fellow at the Washington think tank the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. “This is frequent when with a Quick Look 24-hour assessment like this one.”
