Intelligence on the status of Iran's nuclear program is apparently hidden from even International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors on the ground.
Leaked intelligence from calls of Iranian officials downplaying the destruction of that nuclear program is readily available in liberal media outlets.
Sources told The Washington Post on Sunday of an intercepted call of Iranian officials saying the damage from President Donald Trump's strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities last week was surprisingly less significant than anticipated.
In a pointed news briefing this past week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth admonished the American media and liberal outlets like the Post for leaning on reports that share Iranian propaganda that suits their agenda to tarnish Trump and the B-2 Stealth bombers.
But the leaks from Iranian officials to the sources of the liberal media keep coming to mock Trump and the strikes as not doing enough damage.
"It's shameful that The Washington Post is helping people commit felonies by publishing out-of-context leaks," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Post. "The notion that unnamed Iranian officials know what happened under hundreds of feet of rubble is nonsense. Their nuclear weapons program is over."
That latter point is based on the destruction of the enrichment facilities targeted, a Trump official told the Post, saying the intelligence from the above Iranian call is "wrong because we’ve destroyed their metal conversion facility.
"We know that our weapons were delivered precisely where we wanted them to be delivered and they had the effect that we wanted," the source added.
The IAEA Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi did admit to "severe damage" to Iran's nuclear facilities struck, but in campaigning for the continued Iran cooperation with IAEA nuclear inspectors, he shared the narrative Sunday that "the capacities they have are there."
"They can have, you know, in a matter of months, I would say, a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium, or less than that," Grossi told CBS News' "Face the Nation" on Sunday.
Intelligence officials contacted by the Post note the Iranian call does not take all angles of intelligence, allowing the liberal media to share the Iranian narrative that the strikes did little to set back the Iran nuclear weapons program it had long claimed was not even a nuclear weapons program in the first place.
"A single phone call between unnamed Iranians is not the same as an intelligence assessment, which takes into account a body of evidence, with multiple sources and methods," the intelligence source told the Post.
Democrats are eager to adopt leaks of Iranian officials' propaganda, according to Trump.
"The Democrats are the ones who leaked the information," he wrote Thursday on Truth Social. "They should be prosecuted."
You don't have to read left-leaning media to hear all about how Trump "exaggerated" the impact of the strikes. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei makes the case, as the Post does in its report.
"They attacked our nuclear facilities, but they were unable to do anything important," Khamenei said in defiance of Trump and piggybacking the anti-Trump media messaging.
Some Democrat messaging is more nuanced than suggesting those three nuclear facilities in Iran were not destroyed.
"I walk away from that briefing still under the belief that we have not obliterated the program," Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said. "The president was deliberately misleading the public when he said the program was obliterated. It is certain that there is still significant capability, significant equipment that remain.
"You cannot bomb knowledge out of existence — no matter how many scientists you kill. There are still people in Iran who know how to work centrifuges. And if they still have enriched uranium and they still have the ability to use centrifuges, then you're not setting back the program by years. You’re setting back the program by months."
The frequent war hawk Lindsey Graham admitted, too, the strikes do not end the Iranian nuclear weapons aspirations.
"The real question is, Have we obliterated their desire to have a nuclear weapon?" the South Carolina GOP senator said this past week. "I don't want people to think that the site wasn't severely damaged or obliterated. It was.
"But having said that, I don't want people to think the problem is over, because it's not."
Iran's ambassador to the United Nations admitted as such to "Face the Nation" on Sunday, too, saying, "enrichment will ... never stop."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.