Hegseth on damage to Iran's nuclear sites

Mr. Secretary. Yeah. There's a reason the president calls out fake news for what it is. These pilots, these refuellers, these fighters, these air defenders, the skill and the courage it took to go into enemy territory flying 36 hours on behalf of the American people and the world to take out a nuclear program is beyond what anyone in this audience can fathom. And then the instinct-- the instinct of CNN, the instinct of the New YorkTimes is to try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons to try to hurt President Trump or our country. They don't care what the troops think. They don't care what the world thinks. They want to spin it to try to make him look bad based on a leak. Of course, we've all seen plenty of leakers, and what do leakers do? They have agendas. And what do they do? Do they share the whole information or just the part that they want to introduce? And when they introduce that preliminary-- a preliminary report that's deemed to be low assessment-- do you know what a low assessment means? Low confidence in the data in that report. And why is there low confidence? Because all of the evidence of what was just bombed by 12 30,000-pound bombs is buried under a mountain, devastated and obliterated. So if you want to make an assessment of what happened at Fordow, you better get a big shovel and go really deep because Iran's nuclear program is obliterated, and somebody somewhere is trying to leak something to say, oh, with low confidence, we think maybe it's moderate. Those that dropped the bombs precisely in the right place know exactly what happened when that exploded. And you know who else knows? Iran. That's why they came to the table right away because their nuclear capabilities have been set back beyond what they thought were possible because of the courage of a commander in chief who led our troops, despite what the fake news wants to say.

But you're not disputing the report said what it said, even though it was initial? The report said what it said, and it was fine. It was severe, they think, but they had no idea. They shouldn't have issued a report until they did. But we've gotten the information, and I think Pete said it better than you can say it.