Iran wasn’t the only one taking bunker busters to the teeth recently. The legacy media has suffered another massive blow, and it was spearheaded by the same people who have done wonders, truly elite things, regarding degrading the credibility of the American newsroom.
CNN’s Natasha Bertrand peddled a low-confidence and top-secret intelligence report showing that President Trump’s B-2 bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities had little to no effect. Leaking that report is a crime. To make matters more embarrassing, it was a report that was worthless and laughably unreliable, yet it was peddled as gospel for days. Now, former intelligence officials spoke with the Washington Free Beacon to offer their take on the leaked report, and it was a doozy. One had the best line to describe the report: it’s so unreliable, “you can wipe your a** with it” [emphasis mine]:
The classified DIA report ignited a media firestorm in the days after President Donald Trump authorized precision strikes on Iran’s top three nuclear sites. The findings were leaked to CNN and the New York Times, which presented them as bombshell evidence that the U.S. bombing run only set back Tehran’s nuclear ambitions by several months.
The U.S. intelligence community deemed that initial assessment "low-confidence," a fact CNN omitted from its original piece, and based it solely on satellite imagery and intercepted communications—known as signals intelligence, or SIGINT—from Iranian officials. Shortly after the assessment leaked, Axios reported that communications intercepted by Israel "suggest Iranian military officials have been giving false situation reports to the country's political leadership—downplaying the extent of the damage." Such communications likely made their way into the DIA report, according to three former U.S. intelligence operatives, a current U.S. official, and other veteran national security insiders who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon both on and off the record. Some of them referred to the DIA as the "discount intelligence agency."
"It's basically messaging by the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], messaging by Tehran," said Michael Pregent, a former intelligence officer with U.S. Central Command who operated in the Middle East for nearly 30 years. "DIA is taking a SIGINT report from the National Security Agency ... and putting together an assessment to leak. I know it’s messaging, the Iranians know it’s messaging, and for some reason, NSA believes it’s actual f—ing intelligence."
[…]
"It's clear that those people had no idea what they were talking about, and I agree with the fact that undoubtedly all these [Iranians] knew their phones were being monitored by multiple countries and acted accordingly," the former operative told the Free Beacon. "So, nothing that they said should have been used as any sort of gospel."
The former intelligence officer said that the DIA’s categorization of its own assessment renders it effectively useless.
"The fact that the DIA’s assessment was deemed ‘low-confidence’ means that you can wipe your ass with it," the source added. "You probably get more information from a Free Beacon article."
A third former U.S. official who worked primarily on the Iran portfolio agreed that the initial DIA report included "Iranians repeating propaganda to each other, as they have done throughout the war and preceding preparations."
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Our own Guy Benson said that journalists often don’t take common sense into account when they’re doing these stories, as many are lusting to damage the Trump presidency in some fashion:
📢@guypbenson SLAMS the mainstream media's reporting of the US strikes on Iran: DO A COMMON SENSE CHECK!
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) June 26, 2025
"If you're a journalist...do a common sense check in your mind...The Israelis have had air superiority for 2 weeks over Iran...The US comes in with this extraordinary unique… pic.twitter.com/5nMUhtNdPB
Once again, we’re reminded why the legacy media is mocked, disregarded, and dying in influence. It’s packed with people who don’t know what they’re doing.
🚨TRUTH AIRED ON CNN, FINALLY — After spreading fake news: "It worked! It seems to have worked flawlessly!"
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) June 26, 2025
Total Trump vindication.
"I think from what I've seen, the 20,000 centrifuges...they are all completely destroyed. I am VERY CONFIDENT those centrifuges are GONE!"
In… pic.twitter.com/1ZIPhzzsMR
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