June 26, 2025.

This morning's press conference with Defense Secretary Pete Heggzeth featured an apparently angry

Hegseth yelling at the media for contradicting President Donald Trump's claim that last weekend strikes against Iran had completely obliterated its nuclear weapons program.

Heggz had seemed to be performing for an audience of one as he insisted on the made-for-television narrative the administration has been pushing.

He said, President Trump directed the most complex and secretive military operation in history,

and it was a resounding success, resulting in a ceasefire agreement and the end of the 12-day

war.

D-Day, the June 6, 1944 Allied invasion of France, took a year of planning, involved 156,000 allied soldiers and 195,700 naval personnel, and required cooperation of leaders from 13 countries.

It remains the largest seaborne invasion in history.

After a Senate briefing on the strikes, Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat of Connecticut, told

reporters, to me, it appears that we have only set back the Iranian nuclear program by a handful of months.

There's no doubt there was damage done to the program, but the allegations that we have obliterated their program just don't seem to stand up to reason.

I just do not think the President was telling the truth when he said this program

was obliterated. Julian E. Barnes and David E. Sanger of the New York Times reported today that it

remains unclear where Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium is. This afternoon, Zachary Cohen, Elena Trine, Kylie Atwood,

and Jennifer Hansler of CNN reported that the administration has been engaged in secret talks

to ease sanctions on Iran, free up $6 billion in Iranian funds currently in foreign banks, and help Iran access as much as $30 billion to build a nuclear energy program, all in exchange for Iran freezing its nuclear enrichment program.

Trump ran his 2016 campaign in part by attacking President Barack Obama for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal,

the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, which was a much more stringent deal than the ones suggested in the CNN article.

But there is perhaps a different angle to this deal than the Obama administrations.

The idea of building nuclear power plants in the Middle East was central to Trump's 2016 bid for office.

Members of Trump's inner circle, including Michael Flynn and Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, hatched a plan

...