Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday called a rare Pentagon press conference to defend the U.S. strikes on Iran and lambast the media’s coverage of the effectiveness of the operation.

Hegseth criticized “fawning coverage” of early intelligence findings of the impact of Saturday’s bombing of three Iranian nuclear facilities – which suggested the strikes did not fully take out Tehran’s nuclear program and only set it back by a few months.

“Whether it's fake news CNN, MSNBC or The New York Times, there's been fawning coverage of a preliminary assessment,” Hegseth said during a Pentagon press conference. “It was preliminary – a day and a half after the actual strike – when it admits itself in writing that it requires weeks to accumulate the necessary data to make such an assessment."

"There's low confidence in this particular report," he added.

The Trump administration has pushed back hard at a Defense Intelligence Agency summary that has seemed to refute President Trump’s repeated insistence that Iran’s nuclear program has been “obliterated” and set back by........

© The Hill