Transcript: MAGA Dope Pete Hegseth’s Tantrum Exposes Trump’s Iran Scam
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 26 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Donald Trump and his top advisers have worked themselves up into a pathological fury about the leaked intelligence assessment that casts doubt on the success of Trump’s bombing of Iran, a story that has consumed Washington. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ranted wildly about it during a press conference with Trump at the NATO summit, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went full North Korea in praise of Trump with one of her most absurdly obsequious performances yet. Both of them went full throttle in attacking intelligence officials for leaking the assessment. All of which raises a question: Will this administration ever officially tell the truth about the Iran mission, given that everything always must serve the cult of Trump above all else? Today we’re trying to unravel all this with someone who lives deep in the bowels of the deep state and can explain it really well: veteran national security lawyer Bradley Moss. Thanks for coming on, Brad.
Bradley Moss: Absolutely. Anytime, Greg.
Sargent: So The New York Times, CNN and others have all reported that this report is from the Defense Intelligence Agency. It’s classified, and it found that after all that bombing, Iran’s nuclear program has only been delayed a few months. It also said much of Iran’s enriched uranium was moved to secret locations. Brad, briefly, what is the DIA and why is a report like this from the DIA so important and what should we think about it?
Moss: Sure. The DIA, or the Defense Intelligence Agency, is basically the military’s version of the CIA. It’s the redheaded stepchild. It has fewer resources than CIA. It’s less glamorous in its mission operations than CIA. But it serves that role for the Defense Department in a manner distinct from what CIA does. And the role they particularly had here was to compile this initial assessment. And let’s be very clear: This is just the initial assessment. It’s still classified top secret, which means the unauthorized release of it could cause exceptionally grave damage to national security. It’s still official government assessment. It’s still something that the DIA would present to policymakers, both within DOD, such as Secretary Hegseth, as well as all the way up to the president himself to consider when assessing next steps and how to decide where they want to go from a policy standpoint. That’s the nature. That’s the basis of intelligence assessment. You get your initial information and then you continue to update it as you go along.
Sargent: Just want to be clear though, even if it is initial, this is a really serious document, right? Like these guys are the real deal.
Moss: It’s a very serious document and it’s supposed to be strictly based on the facts of what they have at the moment. So with an initial assessment like this—something they’re rating [or] what is called “low confidence”—it means they’re just going off the basics of what they can easily get. Satellite imagery, anything they’ve caught on intercepts, chatter along those lines. It’s not going to be into the ground, into the literal mud and into the literal dirt of the explosions yet. They don’t have that information yet. It may take a while for them to truly find out how much damage was caused at that level. But this information is absolutely the type of initial assessment that the government would rely upon. Let’s say if they decided they need to do a second round of strikes. You’d be relying on something like this to inform the policymakers and ultimately informing the president of, Do you need to authorize a second strike, a third strike? You’re not going to have that detailed assessment yet. That takes weeks.
