Welcome to the NewsHour. The Trump administration today again furiously defended the U.S.

airstrikes against Iran's nuclear program claiming the facilities were destroyed.

It comes in response to a leaked initial intelligence assessment that said Iran's nuclear program was set back by only a few months.

That leak is now being investigated by the FBI.

The report was produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA.

But the director of the CIA issued a statement last night contradicting its finding.

At an early morning briefing today, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth denounced the news media for its coverage of the report.

Because of decisive military action, President Trump created the conditions to end the war,

decimating, choose your word, obliterating, destroying Iran's nuclear capabilities.

Every outlet has breathlessly reported on a preliminary assessment from

DIA. A day and a half after the actual strike, when it admits itself in writing that it

requires weeks to accumulate the necessary data to make such an assessment, it's preliminary.

It points out that it's not been coordinated with the intelligence community at all.

There's low confidence in this particular report.

It says in the report there are gaps in the information.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Kane, showed a video of the testing of the kind of bomb that was used on Fordo and one other Iranian nuclear site to show the kind of damage it can do.

Meantime, Iran's supreme leader played down the impact of the U.S.-Israeli bombings on Iran's nuclear sites.

They attacked our nuclear facilities, but they were not able to achieve anything significant.

The President of the United States made an unusual exaggeration in describing what had happened.

It became clear that he needed this exaggeration.

Anyone who heard those words understood that beneath the surface of those remarks, there was

another underlying truth.

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