Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) alleged that President Donald Trump's administration got "caught lying" on Iran.
Speaking to MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace on Wednesday, the senator said that Trump's administration is now scrambling to explain why conflicting statements from Trump can both be true.
"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," Trump said Wednesday morning at a NATO meeting. It was very severe. It was obliteration. And you'd think that a media outlet would say, 'Isn't that a great thing?'"
Murphy said that there's always going to be "low confidence" in assessing a strike when the intention was to destroy something underground. So, it didn't make sense that Trump would be so insistent that he "obliterated" the targets.
"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," said Murphy. "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."
He said that if the United States didn't destroy the 60% enriched uranium, then nothing else really matters.
"They frankly don't need that many centrifuges in order to continue to enrich up to nuclear grade. So listen, 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. 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."
He went on to say that it's the reason that the administration is "trying to cover up that lie" using "righteous indignation."
They're "blaming everybody but themselves for the fact that they did the really unforgivable sin of national security communication," said Murphy. "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."
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