WASHINGTON — CIA Director John Ratcliffe ripped Democrats during a closed-door briefing of senators on Thursday by comparing President Donald Trump’s successful airstrikes eliminating Iran’s nuclear program to former President Barack Obama’s failures with his Iran nuclear deal, Breitbart News has learned.
A source in the room present for Ratcliffe’s, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s all-senators closed-door briefing on Thursday told Breitbart News that Democrat senators repeatedly pressed them about the effectiveness of the strikes, pushing for more proof than they have offered on the matter. In response, Ratcliffe told them, per the source present in the room, the way he knew how effective they were was how quickly they folded to Trump versus how long they dragged out negotiations with Obama.
“You know how you know the strikes were devastatingly effective?” Ratcliffe told the Senate Democrats in the briefing per the source who spoke with Breitbart News. “Iran has been fighting Israel for decades. They strung along the Obama administration for 20 months while negotiating the JCPOA. But Trump made them accept a ceasefire with their mortal enemy in 20 minutes.”
Ratcliffe also, during the briefing, reiterated the contents of a statement he previously released publicly in which he said the CIA can confirm that Iran’s nuclear program had been “severely damaged” by the strikes Trump ordered last weekend.
“This includes new intelligence from an historically reliable and accurate source/method that several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years,” Ratcliffe said in part in that public statement, which he reaffirmed to senators behind closed doors.
This revelation of Ratcliffe going all in on this matter comes after Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) publicly expressed confidence in the destruction of Iran’s nuclear capabilities after Trump’s airstrike order and the work by Israeli military officials as well over the last two weeks during the “12-day war.”
It also all comes after a leak to CNN’s Natasha Bertrand–the same reporter who, when she worked at Politico, falsely claimed on behalf of many former failed intelligence community officials that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation—that an initial Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment questioned the success of the strikes. Trump, Ratcliffe, Hegseth, Rubio, and many others in the defense and intelligence communities have aggressively pushed back on that, both in public and in private, arguing that that initial assessment was incorrect and that whoever leaked it committed a crime. The president has suggested the leak may have come from congressional Democrats. Beyond U.S. officials basically universally disagreeing with that assessment, Israeli assessments similarly believe that the Iranian nuclear program is no more.
Ratcliffe’s putdown of Democrats behind closed doors by comparing Obama’s failures with Trump’s successes suggests much of the hullaballoo around this matter is entirely political at this point. The fact that Bertrand was the person to whom whoever leaked the initial assessment went with the story adds fuel to that fire. Trump and the White House have been furious about the leak ever since.
Ratcliffe, meanwhile, has been known by all sides to be a reliable member of the intelligence world. During Trump’s first term, he served as Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and now he is serving as CIA director. He is someone who has a long track record of calling things accurately, even when deep state actors do not, like his decision to release the formal assessment when he became CIA director that the coronavirus pandemic likely emanated from a lab leak in Wuhan, China, or his work during his time as DNI declassifying various documents and materials demonstrating the plot against Trump in the now-proven-to-be-false Russia collusion hoax. Likewise, in this case, if he is going this far in terms of claiming the Iranians have seen this level of significant damage to their nuclear program, he is almost certainly telling the truth.
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