Citing new intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, said that Iranian nuclear facilities have been destroyed by U.S. airstrikes and that if the Iranians attempted to rebuild those facilities it would likely take them years.  

The new Gabbard statement comes as a separate early intelligence assessment found that the United States failed to destroy core component of the Iranian nuclear capacity. According to details of that assessment which were leaked to CNN Tuesday, the strikes only set back Iran by a matter of months.

That report was a product of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the intelligence arm of the Pentagon. The White House has sought to downplay it as “incomplete intelligence,” noting that the assessment was of “low confidence.”

The kerfuffle comes after American B2 bombers dropped 14 30,000-pound GBU-57, or Massive Ordnance Penetrators, on two nuclear facilities buried deep underground in Iran and decades after the U.S. War on Terror, which sowed public doubts about intelligence failures. For his part, President Trump has said unequivocally that the facilities were “obliterated.”

The Israel Atomic Energy Commission said in a statement that the American strike on the reinforced Iranian nuclear site at Fordow “destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable.”

Asked about the origin of the intelligence that Gabbard cited, an intelligence official told RealClearPolitics that “this is new U.S. intelligence.”

Gabbard slammed what she described as “the propaganda media” for trying to undermine what was otherwise heralded as a historic bombing campaign and “President Trump’s decisive leadership.”

On this front, the administration was momentarily on the backfoot ahead of the strikes. Testifying before Congress in March, Gabbard said that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.” Asked about the testimony aboard Air Force One, Trump replied, “I don’t care what she said.”

Less noticed in the press, however, was testimony from Gabbard that Iranian “enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.” The White House told RCP that Trump ordered the strikes under Article II authority to defend the United States against anticipated attacks.

“President Trump and the administration have always been right to say that if Iran chose to make a nuclear bomb, they could do so within weeks,” Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary, told reporters last week, “which obviously poses an imminent threat to the U.S. and the world.”

Now that ability has been destroyed. On this point, and at least publicly, all parties seem to agree, even the Iranians. “Our nuclear installations have been badly damaged, that’s for sure,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei told Al Jazeera.

Three facilities were struck by the United States last Saturday – two centers where enrichment was performed, the Natanz and Fordow facilities, and a third center, Isfahan, where enriched uranium is converted into weapons grade material. Overseas at the NATO Summit in the Netherlands, Secretary of State Marco Rubio emphasized the latter.

“You can’t do a nuclear weapon without a conversion facility,” said Rubio, who also serves as national security advisor. “We can’t even find where it is, where it used to be on the map,” he continued, speaking of the conversion facility. “The whole thing is blackened out. It’s gone. It’s wiped out.”

Any debate over the nuclear capacity of Iran is beyond the pale, according to Vice President JD Vance. “President Trump has obliterated the Iranian nuclear program,” he wrote on social media. “The American media seems destined to obliterate their own credibility on this fake story.”

Philip Wegmann is White House correspondent for RealClearPolitics.