President Trump said Sunday that whoever leaked information about the initial reports on the U.S. airstrikes on Iranian facilities should be prosecuted and that reporters should be pressured to say who did it.
An early intelligence report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, which was leaked to news outlets, suggested the strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities had set the program back by months, raising questions about Mr. Trump’s claim that the program had been “obliterated.”
“They should be prosecuted,” Mr. Trump said of the leaker on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.”
The president said it would be an easy thing to figure out.
“Go up, tell the reporters, ‘National security, who gave it, you have to do it,’” Mr. Trump said. “I suspect we will be doing things like that.”
The White House has dismissed the early intelligence reports and pushed back with various assessments that the bombing set back the nuclear program in a significant way.
“CIA can confirm that a body of credible intelligence indicates Iran’s Nuclear Program has been severely damaged by the recent, targeted strikes,” said CIA Director John Ratcliffe. “This includes new intelligence from a historically reliable and accurate source/method that several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years.”
The Trump administration also has said that it will restrict the amount of classified information it shares with Congress in response to the leak of the earlier Defense Intelligence Agency assessment.
