Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) is sharply criticizing the Trump administration over its handling of recent military actions in Iran, accusing officials of misleading the public about the operation’s effectiveness.
Speaking on MSNBC with host Nicolle Wallace on Wednesday, Murphy claimed that President Donald Trump’s team “got caught lying” after offering conflicting statements about the results of a U.S. strike targeting Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
“The intelligence was — was very inconclusive. The intelligence says we don’t know. It could have been very severe. That’s what the intelligence says. So I guess that’s correct. But I think we can take that. We don’t know,” President Trump said earlier that day during a NATO meeting. He added, “It was very severe.
It was obliteration. And you’d think that a media outlet would say, ‘Isn’t that a great thing?'” Murphy responded by saying such definitive claims are inconsistent with intelligence assessments. “There’s always going to be low confidence in assessing a strike when the intention was to destroy something underground,” he said.
“We don’t have cameras underneath there. We don’t know exactly what we hit or what we didn’t hit. But the initial assessment of [Defense Intelligence Agency] DIA, of the photographic evidence is that they did not fundamentally destroy those assets,” Murphy explained.
“And what we also know is that the Iranians were successful in moving a lot of the enriched uranium out of Fordo, and that maybe is the most important fact,” Murphy emphasized that unless the 60% enriched uranium was destroyed, the mission’s core objective was not achieved. “They frankly don’t need that many centrifuges in order to continue to enrich up to nuclear grade,” he added.
“They’re mad. They’re furious. You can see it in their voice because they got caught in a lie. They got caught in a lie,” said Murphy. “They went out there and said that the nuclear capacity of Iran was obliterated, that we’d set back the program at least a year. They knew they were lying when they said it.
They got caught in the lie. That’s super embarrassing.” According to Murphy, the administration is now scrambling to manage the fallout. “They’re trying to cover up that lie using righteous indignation,” he said, accusing the White House of deflecting blame. “They’re blaming everybody but themselves for the fact that they did the really unforgivable sin of national security communication,” Murphy said.
“They fudged intelligence about our national security. You can’t do that because, as we have seen over and over again over the course of our history, that’s what gets us into unnecessary wars of choice. That’s what gets not dozens or hundreds of Americans killed, but thousands of Americans killed. They’re angry because they got caught lying this weekend.”