All those breathless headlines about Iran’s nuclear program from the fake news media on Tuesday are, well, fake news. Shocking, I know.
We kind of already knew that, as my colleague Chris Queen reported yesterday and others have spoken out on it, but when it comes to foreign policy, I listen to one man and one man only, and that is Secretary of State Marco Rubio. On Wednesday, he not only set the record straight on the impact of bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, but he also explained why most of Europe is wrong to want to sanction Russia.
Rubio, who is traveling with President Donald Trump to Europe this week, sat down for an interview with Politico on Wednesday morning, and, as you can imagine, Iran was the first topic to come up. After expressing his frustration with intelligence leaks and the people who read them but don’t understand them or who want to use them to promote their own agenda, he explained that our bombs did significant damage to Iran’s nuclear program.
Let me tell you this. The Iranian program, the nuclear program today, looks nothing like it did just a week ago. The program today has been set behind significantly from where it was a week ago. It is in far worse shape today than it was a week ago because of U.S. actions and because some of the actions the Israelis took. So the bottom line is they are much further away from a nuclear weapon today than they were before the President took this bold action. That’s the most important thing to understand. Significant, very significant, substantial damage was done to a variety of different components, and we’re just learning more about it.
Understand that most of the damage that occurred here in Fordow occurred deep underground. That’s why we used penetrator weaponry to do that. So that’s why I hate commenting on these stories, because often the first story is wrong and the person putting it out there has an agenda. And I would say that story is a false story and it’s one that really shouldn’t be re-reported because it doesn’t accurately reflect what’s happening here.
When asked when a full assessment of the damage would be complete, Rubio said there isn’t a timeline for that. He did, however, go into more detail about the damage.
Well, some of it is on open source because of MAX-R and other technologies that are showing you the pictures. So in Isfahan, there was this conversion site, which is how you turn this metal into something that’s useful. That’s wiped out. Can you – you can rebuild anything that’s destroyed. You could if you wanted to, but it’s completely wiped out. And so they can’t do that today. Beyond that, all of the support structures around it as well.
In Natanz, which is also an underground facility, that had already been destroyed. Basically the Israelis had put a lot of damage on it, and then the United States went in with two additional heavy munitions that penetrated into the ground and did more damage. So it was already in bad shape and unusable, and now it’s worse off.
The hard one, the one that was really difficult, is Fordow because it’s buried underneath a mountain at about 2- to 300 meters underground and – meters or feet, I forget – 300 underground. It was deep. And there’s no doubt in our minds that very significant, substantial, lasting damage was done to their program. We will learn more and more about it, but the baseline is real damage was done. Of that, we’re very confident.
“But the most important thing here at the end of the day is they have less capacity today than they did just a week ago to rapidly produce a nuclear weapon behind the world’s back and threaten the world, and the president deserves a tremendous amount of credit for taking this bold stand,” Rubio said. “And these pilots did something extraordinary. They flew halfway across the world and dropped 12 munition bombs perfectly down a ventilation shaft and did the world a great favor. These pilots did an incredible job. I’m blown away by it. It’s science fiction stuff,” he added.
Rubio concluded, “We dropped 12 of these things into these holes. I mean, it’s not like we just did a couple and see how it went.” I think those are terms that anyone can understand.
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When asked about the portion of the MAGA base that voted for Trump to get away from George Bush-era foreign policy, Rubio also made it clear that an ongoing war was not President Trump’s goal. In fact, he said, the president is not looking for a war with Iran at all; he’s looking for a deal. He also echoed Trump’s sentiments that it’s time for a regime change in Iran, but that it will be up to the Iranian people.
No. Listen, the world is filled with regimes I don’t like and the President doesn’t like and a lot of us wish didn’t exist. The United States’ job is not to go around and set up governments for every country. The United States’ job is to protect our national security. Our national security issue with Iran is with a clerical regime that wants nuclear weapons so they can threaten us, threaten Israel today, threaten us tomorrow. And the President has made clear that’s not going to happen. That’s what he’s focused on.
I think what he was commenting, which is exactly right, is look, if your country continues to fall behind economically because you’re living under sanctions because you insist on sponsoring terrorist organizations around the world and spending all your money on Hamas and Hizballah instead of on your own people, yeah, maybe there will be regime change, but it’s because the people of Iran will do it. But that’s not our plan; it’s never been our plan. He’s never once talked about that being our plan. The plan here was very simple: hit the three sites, the three nuclear sites, and get out. And he did it. No loss of American life. We lost tragically – more Americans died evacuating from Afghanistan than were killed in this operation, because the number in this operation were zero.
Later in the day, while President Trump was meeting with the NATO Secretary General, Rubio went a bit nuclear himself on the intelligence leaks and fake news reports. I’ll let you watch Mad Marco — can we call him that? — for yourself. He ain’t playing around.
.@SecRubio sets the record straight for the Fake News: “These leakers are professional stabbers… There’s no way Iran comes to the table if somehow nothing had happened. This was a complete and total obliteration… They are way behind today compared to where they were just 7… pic.twitter.com/V3wrIjic8F
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) June 25, 2025
You can watch the Politico interview here if you’re interested.
We knew that story was fake the moment it came out. When it comes to President Trump and the current administration, you’ll never hear the real story from the fake news media, but you’ll always hear it here at PJ Media.
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