Breaking News from Pod Save America - Top Trump Official Throws TANTRUM After Media Questions on Iran Lies

Episode Date: June 26, 2025

Tommy Vietor discusses Pete Hegseth melting down over media questions about Iran. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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and we'll give you a better deal on the best network. Based on Route Metrics, Best Overall Mobile Network Performance, U.S. second half, 2025, all right preserved, must provide a very recent postpaid consumer mobile bill in the name of the person redeeming the deal, additional terms, conditions, and restrictions apply. President Trump is enraged about reports that say U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear program only set them back a few months. So we sent out Pete Hexeth, his often drunk Secretary of Defense, to rant and rave about it

and scream at the press corps and even scream at his own former Fox News colleague. Let's watch. Do you have certainty that all the highly enriched uranium was inside the Fordham Mountain or some of it because 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? Of course, we're watching every single aspect. But Jennifer, you've been about the worst. The one who misrepresents the most intentionally. What the president says. I'm familiar. I was the last report about the ventilation shafts on Saturday night. And in fact, I was the first

to describe the B2 bombers, the refueling, the entire mission with great accuracy. So I take issue with that. I appreciate you acknowledging that this was the first operate the most successful, uh, mission based on operational security that this department has done since you've been here. And I appreciate that. So that was Fox News reporter, Jennifer Griffin, Pete Hickset's colleague like five, six months ago. She's asking a totally fair, actually critically important question, which is where is Iran's uranium stockpile? I thought that was the entire reason we're bombing them. It's because we wanted to take out that uranium stockpile. It sounds like we don't know where it is, though. And, and I'll,

explain more about that stockpile, the latest intelligence assessment of Iran's nuclear program. But let's just first talk about why reporters are asking these questions. So in his speech right after the bombing raid on Saturday night, President Trump said, quote, Iran's key nuclear facilities have been completely and totally obliterated. But the problem is that was a lie. We know it was a lie because there was no way for him to have known the status of Iran's nuclear facilities because no one knew. The Iranians didn't know. The Israelis didn't know. The U.S. military and intelligence community didn't know. We know that because the chairman of the Joint Chiefs said as much the next day. He said the battle damage assessment isn't done yet. It'll take some days and weeks to figure out exactly

what the impact of this bombing raid was. And one of the reasons they didn't have an assessment quickly is because the 30,000 pound bunker busting bomb that the U.S. dropped on Iran had never been used in combat before. No one knew if it worked or not. They needed time to assess it. So these guys just, they cannot help lying. They cannot help puffing up Trump in everything he does. Here's another example from Hexas Presser today. Let me read the bottom line here. President Trump directed the most complex and secretive military operation in history.

The most complex and secretive military operation in history, Pete, in history? This was 125 planes. D-Day involved over 150,000 troops, 5,000 ships, 11,000 aircraft, like a dozen allies. There were fake armies to fool the Germans. They were double agents who got fed fake intelligence to feel the access powers. The Iran operation was more complicated than that. More complicated than the Manhattan Project, more complicated than the operation to take

out Osama bin Laden. Like this hyperbole is what reporters are pushing back on. So let's talk about these leaked reports that made Trump so mad. So there's a bunch of news reports starting with CNN, then the New York Times, who spoke with someone who had seen. a preliminary defense intelligence agency assessment of the strike. That's sort of the military intelligence wing. It is totally fair to note that that first assessment was incomplete, but it was also the only factual information the media had to go with, and it seemed to contradict what

the President of the United States said. And at the same time, the administration was canceling briefings for Congress about the strike, which raised a lot of eyebrows and made people think, well, maybe they're hiding something. Frankly, they lie. about everything. And so as we speak, the U.S., the Israelis, probably a bunch of other intelligence services, are trying to figure out the impact of the U.S. and Israeli strikes at Iran's nuclear program. My guess is they're looking at satellite imagery. There's probably drones flying over these facilities trying to collect information. The U.S. Air Force actually has a special plane called a WC.-135 Constant Phoenix. It's often referred to as a nuclear sniffer because what it does is it

flies around and it literally collects samples from the atmosphere to try and detect and identify nuclear material. I can imagine the intelligence community is doing like seismic assessments to see if the structure of Fordo, the underground facility is still there. Trump keeps suggesting that the Israelis might have someone on the ground checking out the site. If it's true, Trump just blew their cover pretty hard. That's a pretty dangerous leak of sensitive information. More generally speaking, I wonder about a lot of Israeli assets on the ground getting either killed or swept up or pushed out of the country because of this operation. And then the various intel agencies will try to intercept communications from Iranian officials

to figure out what they know, right? Like what are the military generals talking about? What are they saying to each other about the damage done to the photo site, the Natanz site, the Asfahan sites, the three main nuclear sites that were bombed? They'll also, you know, maybe have paid sources sort of in the Iranian military or government that can give us information. But stepping back even more, the truth is we might never know exactly what happened with these nuclear sites. At the moment, I'm skeptical that the Iranians even know because this is buried deep underground. It's going to take time to dig the foreto site up, to collect more information. And the international inspectors that usually monitor Iran's nuclear sites, the IAEA, they're getting to be.

denied access because obviously the Iranians are furious that they were just bombed. So this broader question of how do we assess the efficacy of these strikes is a really complicated one. Like part of it seems to be a comparison to how long it would take Iran to build back their nuclear infrastructure and program to exactly what it is at the before the strikes happened. But I'm not sure that's the best way to think about it because there's all these reports, as we mentioned at the top, as Jennifer Griffin was asking, that Iran may have moved a stockpile of enriched uranium or have other covert sites where they do nuclear work. And actually, the Financial Times just before we started recording this, reported that their

preliminary intelligence assessments that were provided to European government indicate that Iran's highly enriched uranium stockpile is largely intact following the U.S. strike on the Fordo facility and that it's been moved around to other sites. And the reason that matter is because you can take that 60% enriched uranium, put it into these things called centrifuges, which enrich it further to weapons grade. And with that large of a stockpile, Iran would then have enough nuclear material for 10 nuclear weapons. So you can tell why, look, Trump wants credit for the strike. He's acting like he's offended on behalf of the troops who conducted the operation, when in reality, he just doesn't want anyone questioning whether

this strike worked or not. And the reality is, it's an open question, which is why all these U.S. officials are trying to duck this question in particular. Like J.D. Vance was on Fox News with Brett Baer, who is kind of usually the in-house propagandist for the Trump administration over at Fox News. And Brett Baer asked him the same question, where is the highly enriched uranium? And J.D. said, well, I think that's actually not the question before us. It's not. We don't care where they're highly enriched uranium stockpile is. You know, J.D. Vance then says, our goal was to bury the uranium, which gets back to the question, did you do it or not?

So this is why Pete Heggseth went out, ranted and raved at the press today. This is why we don't trust the administration when they tell us that this strike was, you know, a spectacular success or that Iran's nuclear infrastructure was totally obliterated or that was the most complex and secretive operation in the history of world because it's all self-evidently bullshit. So J.D. Vance, Pete Heggseth, Donald Trump, they're going to keep screaming at the press and lying to you guys at press events about what happened in this Iran's. strike. We will watch these events so that you don't have to and try to get you the facts about what actually happened. One way you could help us do that would be to subscribe to Pod Save America

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