Gabbard, Ratcliffe dodge questions about Trump’s Iran war planning

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe dodged questions about President Trump’s planning for the war with Iran and to what extent the president was briefed on the possible scenarios in the lead-up to the airstrikes against Tehran.

Lawmakers attempted to utilize the rare hearing to extract answers from senior Trump officials on the expanding U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. 

Several senators pressed both during the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing on “Worldwide Threats” on Wednesday on whether Iran posed an imminent “nuclear” threat to the U.S., one of the justifications the president and other top Republicans referenced when asked why the decision was made to attack Iran.

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) asked Gabbard if the assessment of the intelligence community (IC) was that there was an “imminent nuclear threat” posed by the Iranian regime. 

Gabbard said the IC assessment was that Iran “maintained the intention to rebuild and to continue to grow their nuclear enrichment capability.” 

When asked again, Gabbard said the only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat to the country is the president. 

“Here’s the problem. It is precisely your responsibility to determine what constitutes a threat to the United States,” the Georgia Democrat said. 

Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) asked if either Gabbard or Ratcliffe were in the room with Trump when Trump was making the final decision to strike Iran on Feb. 28. 

Ratcliffe said he was in “dozens” of briefings with the president in the lead-up to the strikes and added that “I don’t know if there was a single meeting where there was a single time where a decision was made.” 

Gabbard confirmed she was present in those discussions. 

Earlier this week, Trump claimed that he was surprised that nobody briefed him ahead of time that Iran might retaliate against Gulf nations, although experts have publicly warned about the possibility in the past, including that Tehran could try to choke off the Strait of Hormuz. 

“Nobody, nobody, no, no, no. No, the greatest experts, nobody thought they were going to hit – they were – I wouldn’t say friendly countries, they were like neutral. They lived with them for years,” the president said on Monday. 

When King asked about Trump’s comments, Ratcliffe said he had not heard them and stated that Iran had “specific” plans to hit U.S. interests in “energy sites” across the Middle East region and that is why the Pentagon and State Department “took measures for force protection and personnel protection in advance” of Operation Epic Fury. 

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the committee, asked Gabbard if she briefed the president that if he started the war with Iran, Tehran would strike Gulf countries and close off the strait. 

“I have not and won’t divulge internal conversations,” Gabbard told Warner. “I will say that those of us within the intelligence community continue to provide the president with all of the best objective intelligence available to inform his decisions.” 

Ratcliffe told King, who is also on the Senate Armed Services Committee, that he briefs Trump on intelligence between 10 and 15 times a week on average.

“Sometimes there are dedicated sessions that last hours in length. Sometimes I’m briefing him on specific issues, sometimes three or four times a day,” the CIA director said.

Gabbard said “yes” when asked if the intelligence community assessed if Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was “obliterated” when the U.S. struck the nation’s three premier sites in June and that there have been no efforts since then to try to rebuild the enrichment capability.

The International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said Wednesday morning that he does not believe that Iran’s nuclear program can be eliminated solely by military action. 

“This program is a very vast program. It’s a program that has been built throughout the years, decades of efforts, and it’s scattered across a number of places,” Grossi told reporters. 

The CIA director noted that Iran is gaining experience in “these larger, more powerful booster technologies” regarding developing long-range missiles, with ranges of 3,000 kilometers, warning that if left unimpeded, Tehran “would have the ability to range missiles” to the continental US.

“It’s one of the reasons why degrading Iran’s missile production capabilities that is taking place right now in Operation Epic Fury is so important to our national security,” he told senators. 

The hearing came as ODNI released the annual threat assessment, a 34-page report, and a day after one of Gabbard’s top aides, Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned, in protest of the ongoing U.S. war with Iran. 

Ahead of the hearing, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in an interview with Fox News that Trump has full confidence in Gabbard, who fended off questions about her presence at an FBI raid, outside the facility in Fulton County, Ga., earlier this year.  

“I did not participate in a law enforcement activity, nor would I, because that does not exist within my authorities,” Gabbard said, adding that she was there to “observe” the operation to seize voter records from the 2020 election. 

Kent was sparsely mentioned during the briefing, although Ratcliffe noted that he disagreed with the ex-counterterrorism chief, who claimed in his resignation letter that Iran was not an imminent threat to the U.S.

The CIA director told Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a senior member of the panel, that there’s no indication that Iran had ceased in its nuclear ambitions or its goal to continue building ballistic missiles. 

“In fact, the intelligence reflects the contrary,” Ratcliffe said. 

The U.S. military has struck more than 7,800 targets inside Iran so far, U.S. Central Command said on Wednesday. The strikes have killed Iran’s longtime leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, dozens of top military and intelligence officials and Ali Larijani, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Secretary.

Even with the continuous onslaught, the IC assessed that Iran’s regime is “intact, but degraded,” Gabbard said. She also told senators that Iran “has previously demonstrated space launch and other technology it could use to begin to develop a militarily viable ICBM before 2035, should Tehran attempt to pursue that capability.”

During questioning from Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), who is also on the Senate Armed Services panel, Ratcliffe confirmed that Iran continued building, following Operation Midnight Hammer, short-range and mid-range ballistic missiles. 

The CIA director told Rounds that Tehran has continued to develop the missiles and “at rates that were alarming.” 

Iran is seeking intelligence assistance from Russia, China and other U.S. adversaries, Ratcliffe confirmed on Wednesday, but added that whether those countries are offering aid to Tehran is something he would discuss in the classified portion of the hearing. 

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