Democrats are claiming that the strikes on three of Iran's nuclear facilities earlier this month weren't as successful as being claimed because it's "their narrative," retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer said on Newsmax Sunday.
"If you go into the left's Twitterverse, X-verse, they're all saying gas prices aren't down. The economy is not doing well. It's like an alternate universe," Shaffer told Newsmax's "Wake Up America Weekend."
Shaffer added that the strikes used the "best of our aviators in the Air Force," who dropped 14 bombs on the Fordo site alone.
Meanwhile, the Defense Intelligence Agency's initial report, which was leaked to the media and downplayed the effects of the strikes, was based on single-source imagery pictures and holes on the ground, said Shaffer.
He added that people don't understand that people at the level of the president and secretary of Defense have intelligence sources available to them "that inform their thinking that these low-level analysts don't even know about."
"How do I know that? Because I used to run operations like that at that level, and only 10 people would know about an operation," said Shaffer. "So this whole thing is a fiction."
This means that whoever leaked the initial report "should be investigated, and not only investigated … put in jail," he said.
Meanwhile, Iranian officials are prosecuting and executing people for cooperating with Israeli intelligence sources, and Shaffer said this shows that the Israelis were able to use effective intelligence to take out senior Iranian military leaders and nuclear scientists.
The results have created a secondary effect of Iran being "superparanoid," he said. "They're going to continue to enhance that by hinting that yeah, there are certain people that knew certain things, so I think it's very clear that continues to decimate them."
Shaffer also commented on the meeting between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the NATO conference last week.
"I don't think Trump gets along very well with Zelenskyy," he said. "I think a lot of this comes down to personality. I'm not saying he gets along any better with [Vladimir] Putin. I'm just saying that Zelenskyy has not done things to really endear himself to the president. So at this point, I think it's a situation where the economic options we have regarding Russian oil is going to be about the only thing we can bring to bear to push them to the table."
Still, he said, Russia will "continue to gobble up Ukraine and probably insinuate some sort of military solution by, I don't know, August, September."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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