MSNBC host Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, took a shot at President Donald Trump as the narrative around his Iran strikes spirals out of control.
Trump has insisted that U.S. airstrikes in Iran left the nation's nuclear program “obliterated.” The president's boast has been met with some skepticism, however, after a leaked intelligence report suggested Iran's program was only set back by a matter of months, rather than years.
Senior U.S. intelligence officials, including CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, have both said Iran’s nuclear program was “severely damaged” or “obliterated." However, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) spoke to reporters Thursday after emerging from a classified briefing, and emerged with an entirely different opinion.
"I walk away from that briefing still under the belief that we have not obliterated the program," Murphy said. "The president was deliberately misleading the public when he said the program was obliterated."
Steele welcomed Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) to his show, "The Weeknight" on MSNBC, and couldn't help but scoff at the president's dilemma.
"You know, it just, at this point, it would be laughable if it wasn't so dangerously sad where we are with this. The president trying to, and by the way, struggling, to control the narrative on this, largely because of information that his own government, his own national security team, is putting out on the street," Steele chided with a laugh.
"You sat in the hearing. You got the briefing. Tell us what you are making of this right now? And how concerned are you about the stability of our foreign policymakers to deal with the thing that they’ve started to unleash in the Middle East by going after Iran and sort of carrying the waters, if you will, for Benjamin Netanyahu's designs against Iran?"
Van Hollen replied that he's "very concerned," and said it's "pretty clear" Trump is "deliberately misleading the country about the results of the military action he took."
"I remain absolutely convinced that this was unjustified," said Van Hollen. "There was more time for diplomacy, and instead of giving that time, the president decided, as you say, once Prime Minister Netanyahu had launched attacks on Iran, to abandon the diplomatic talks and join those attacks, drag America into a conflict, when he said he would be the president to keep America out of conflicts."
Van Hollen added that he's worried about the information that Trump and his "political minions" will "allow to come out of the intelligence community."
Trump and Pentagon Chief Pete Hegseth have essentially declared that anybody with a different narrative is "somehow a traitor to our country," which he warned is "just a way of saying to all the folks in our professional intelligence community: if you tell the truth, you're going to be punished. That's very dangerous."
