Karoline Leavitt says CNN reporter should be 'ashamed' as she details what REALLY happened with Iran's enriched uranium in strikes
Leavitt spoke to the state of Iran 's nuclear program hours after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth once again lectured reporters for publishing initial conclusions of a Defense Intelligence Agency analysis that said the strike may have just knocked back Iran's nuclear program by a few months.
Leavitt picked up where Hegseth left off, ripping CNN reporter who authored a story about the initial assessment.
'So we were watching closely, and there was no indication to the United States that any of that enriched uranium was moved prior to the strike,' she said.
She called it 'one of the most secretive and successful operations in United States history.'
Hours earlier, President Donald Trump posted about satellite imagery prior to the strike that showed a line of 16 trucks on a road near the Fordow site. That has been the basis for speculation that the Iranians could have moved some of their enriched uranium – which could allow them to quickly restart a nuclear weapons program if they had access to centrifuges for further enrichment.
'The cars and small trucks at the site were those of concrete workers trying to cover up the top of the shafts. Nothing was taken out of facility. Would take too long, too dangerous, and very heavy and hard to move!' Trump wrote.
That came after Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Dan Caine provided Pentagon reporters with a detailed blow-by-blow of the operation, explaining that initial 'bunker bunker' bombs targeted air shafts, allowing later bombs to penetrate deeper and deeper into the mountain facility.
Leavitt also attacked the media for reporting on an early 'low confidence' classified Defense Intelligence Agency analysis of the strike. He rolled out a lengthy attack on CNN reporter Natasha Bertrand, who authored one of the stories about it.
She brought up stories the reporter wrote back to 2020, including one on the COVID lab leak theory and another on what she called the 'suckers and losers' hoax.
'I believe the FBI is investigating to find out who that leaker was, because it's illegal and they should be held accountable for that leaked bits and pieces of an Intel assessment to push a false narrative,'
'And it's to the same reporter, I will add, Natasha Bertrand of CNN, who has done this in the past. In 2020 it was Natasha Bertrand who had 51 intelligence analysts falsely lied to her, but she still put it on paper for some reason, that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation ... Also in 2020 this same reporter, Natasha Bertrand, wrote that a top Intel agency ruled out the man-made lab leak theory of the Coronavirus origins. Again, the President was right about that,' she said, listing other stories by the reporter.
CNN defended Bertrand earlier after Trump went after her.
'We stand 100 percent behind Natasha Bertrand's journalism and specifically her and her colleagues' reporting of the early intelligence assessment of the U.S. attack on Iran's nuclear facilities,' it said in a statement. 'CNN's reporting made clear that this was an initial finding that could change with additional intelligence. We have extensively covered President Trump's own deep skepticism about it.'
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reemerged to deliver a taped statement in front of brown curtains to declare that the attack 'could not achieve anything significant.'
Leavitt dismissed his account.
'Look, we saw the Ayatollah's video. And when you have a totalitarian regime, you have to save face. I think any common sense, open minded person knows the truth about these precision strikes on Saturday night. They were wildly successful,' she said.
On Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance told Fox News that Iran's cache of 800 pounds of enriched uranium that is short of weapons-grade could still be intact.
He said it's location 'is not the question before us' and said the real question is: 'Can Iran enrich the uranium to weapons-grade level and can they convert that fuel into a nuclear weapon?'
'We are going to work in the coming weeks to ensure that we do something with that fuel and that's one of the things that we're going to have conversations with the Iranians about,' Vance told ABC's This Week on Sunday.
'The goal was to bury the uranium, and I do think the uranium is buried,' he said.
Amid the uncertainty, one possibility raised by experts is that the Iranian regime has moved nuclear material to yet another site, 'Pickaxe mountain.'
Previous satellite images have shown heavy construction at Pickaxe, and Iran reportedly dismissed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) when asked what was occurring in the bowels of the mountain 90 miles south of Fordow.
Hegseth also attested to the success of the operation in burying Iran's enriched uranium, before getting in a tense-exchange with Jennifer Griffin of Fox News.
'There's nothing that I've seen that suggests that what we didn't hit exactly what we wanted to hit in those locations,' Hegseth siad.
'That's not the question, though. It's about highly enriched uranium. Do you have certainty that all the highly enriched uranium was inside the Fordow mountain, or some of it?' Griffin followed up. 'There were satellite photos that showed more than a dozen trucks there two days in advance. Are you certain none of that highly enriched uranium was moved?'
That prompted Hegseth to attack the reporter. 'Of course, we're watching every single aspect,' he said. 'But Jennifer, you've been about the worst, the one who misrepresents the most intentionally what the President says.'
She then defended her record and pointed prior reporting about the B-2 bomber mission that targeted Fordow.
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7 minutes ago
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Reuters
8 minutes ago
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