WASHINGTON (Sputnik) – The administration of US President Donald Trump is mulling limiting sharing of classified information with Congress after sensitive analyses of the consequences of US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities have been leaked to the press, Axios reported on Wednesday, citing sources.
The sources said that the White House is planning to limit posting on CAPNET, a web resource that the administration uses to share classified information with Congress, after media got hold of a sensitive battle damage assessment by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency.
«The intelligence community is figuring out how to tighten up their processes so we don’t have ‘Deep State’ actors leaking parts of intel analysis that have ‘low confidence’ to the media,» a senior White House official told the news portal, adding that the FBI was also looking into the leak.
Earlier in the day, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that the report on the results of the strike on Iran was preliminary, but an investigation, including by the FBI, into the leak of classified information regarding the operation was underway.
On Tuesday, CNN reported, citing a report by the US Defense Intelligence Agency, that US strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities did not destroy the main components of Iran’s nuclear program but, according to a preliminary intelligence assessment, only «set back» its development by several months. Articles citing the internal assessment were also later published by The New York Times and ABC News.
Following the reports, Trump accused The New York Times and CNN of trying to spread misleading information regarding the results of US strikes on Iranian facilities. In his posts on the matter, the US president accused the outlets of trying to «demean one of the most successful military strikes in history» and called the authors «bad and sick people.»
