Trump spends NATO summit trying to rebut early US intel assessment about strikes on Iran

President Donald Trump and his top national security officials spent much of their day in the Netherlands working to rebut an early intelligence report that assessed weekend US strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months.

The details of the report, which were first reported by CNN, clearly angered the president as he made his way through a brief NATO summit here. They first emerged as he was sitting down for dinner on Tuesday with fellow leaders at a Dutch royal palace, where he was invited to spend the night.

On Wednesday, top administration officials tried to paint a more devastating picture of the strikes. And a senior White House official said the administration would begin to limit its sharing of classified information with Congress, believing the report from the Pentagon’s intelligence arm was leaked after it was posted to CAPNET, a system used for sharing intelligence with Capitol Hill.

Trump had once hoped this week’s conference might act as something of a victory lap following the strikes and his success in brokering a ceasefire between Iran and Israel two days later. And several leaders lavished praise on Trump for taking decisive action against Iran’s nuclear program, none more vividly than the NATO chief Mark Rutte, who compared Trump to “daddy” for his efforts to end the fighting in the Middle East.

Yet details in the early report from the Pentagon’s intelligence arm still clouded the president’s various appearances. He raised the matter himself at various points, taking shots at the media and calling on his secretaries of State and Defense, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, to buffer his arguments before the cameras. The White House even trotted out a statement from Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission to bolster their case.