In the week since President Donald Trump involved the United States military in the war between Israel and Iran, a leaked early intelligence report appeared to contradict his administration's claims that U.S. airstrikes "obliterated" Iran's nuclear facilities.
It's the latest conflict between the president and the U.S. intelligence community. A day before Trump ordered the strikes on Iran, he told reporters that Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was "wrong" about the objective of Iran's nuclear program.
“She gave this testimony back in March in which she just plainly said what the intelligence assessments have been for years, which is Iran is not trying to build a nuclear weapon," Shane Harris of The Atlantic told Washington Week moderator Jeffrey Goldberg.
"When the president made the decision that we're going to attack Iran, she had to scramble to quickly say, 'Oh, well, oh, but what I meant was,' and there are these caveats in the intelligence," Harris added.
“She's trying very quickly to get the intelligence in her statements about it to line up with the president's political preferences. That is dangerous in the conduct of intelligence.”