The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 26 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Donald Trump and his top advisers have worked themselves up into a pathological fury about the leaked intelligence assessment that casts doubt on the success of Trump’s bombing of Iran, a story that has consumed Washington. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ranted wildly about it during a press conference with Trump at the NATO summit, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went full North Korea in praise of Trump with one of her most absurdly obsequious performances yet. Both of them went full throttle in attacking intelligence officials for leaking the assessment. All of which raises a question: Will this administration ever officially tell the truth about the Iran mission, given that everything always must serve the cult of Trump above all else? Today we’re trying to unravel all this with someone who lives deep in the bowels of the deep state and can explain it really well: veteran national security lawyer Bradley Moss. Thanks for coming on, Brad.
Bradley Moss: Absolutely. Anytime, Greg.
Sargent: So The New York Times, CNN, and others have all reported that this report is from the Defense Intelligence Agency. It’s classified, and it found that after all that bombing, Iran’s nuclear program has only been delayed a few months. It also said much of Iran’s enriched uranium was moved to secret locations. Brad, briefly, what is the DIA, and why is a report like this from the DIA so important, and what should we think about it?
Moss: Sure. The DIA, or the Defense Intelligence Agency, is basically the military’s version of the CIA. It’s the redheaded stepchild. It has fewer resources than CIA. It’s less glamorous in its mission operations than CIA. But it serves that role for the Defense Department, in a manner distinct from what CIA does. And the role they particularly had here was to compile this initial assessment. And let’s be very clear: This is just the initial assessment. It’s still classified, top secret, which means the unauthorized release of it could cause exceptionally grave damage to national security. It’s still official government assessment. It’s still something that the DIA would present to policymakers, both within DOD, such as Secretary Hegseth, as well as all the way up to the president himself to consider when assessing next steps and how to decide where they want to go from a policy standpoint. That’s the nature. That’s the basis of intelligence assessment. You get your initial information, and then you continue to update it as you go along.
Sargent: Just want to be clear though, even if it is initial, this is a really serious document, right? Like, these guys are the real deal.
Moss: It’s a very serious document and it’s supposed to be strictly based on the facts of what they have at the moment. So with an initial assessment like this—something they’re rating [or] what is called “low confidence”—it means they’re just going off the basics of what they can easily get. Satellite imagery, anything they’ve caught on intercepts, chatter along those lines. It’s not going to be into the ground, into the literal mud and into the literal dirt of the explosions yet. They don’t have that information yet. It may take a while for them to truly find out how much damage was caused at that level. But this information is absolutely the type of initial assessment that the government would rely upon. Let’s say if they decided they need to do a second round of strikes. You’d be relying on something like this to inform the policymakers and ultimately informing the president of, Do you need to authorize a second strike, a third strike? You’re not going to have that detailed assessment yet. That takes weeks.
Sargent: Right. And that’s exactly why The New York Times and CNN … by the way, their national security reporters have been on this story. That’s why those reporters who are also pros are taking this so seriously. It’s really a document that’s meant to inform the way policy thinkers think right now. The only fucking thing that Trump and his top officials can take from it is, How does it reflect on Trump?
Moss: Presidents since the dawn of the modern American military and modern defense apparatus have relied upon initial assessments like this. They’ve put out information to the media. The media has scrutinized and gone to see if there was more detail to it since the dawn of that era going back to World War I and World War II. And we’ve been able to do it without this insanity and the overblown exaggerations you see with Donald Trump. But with him, everything has to be amazing. It has to be the biggest explosion you’ve ever seen. It has to be the most amazing head-turning destruction you’ve ever seen. People have to be lining up to tell him with tears in their eyes that it was so amazing [and] they’ve never seen anybody do anything like it before.
Part of that is because it comes from his life as a salesman. That’s what he does. But the bigger concern is the fact that he can’t level with the American people one way or the other on what came of this. Maybe it was. Let’s be fair. Maybe it was what he says it was. It was this massive success in that regard, and it completely decimated the Iranian nuclear system and apparatus for years to come. That may be the case, but wait till you have the information. Other presidents could have been able to do it, be able to do it just fine like grown men and one day women. He can’t do it because he’s just an insolent little boy.
Sargent: Absolutely. And his own advisers, the tone that they’re setting is taken straight from the top. We had Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth unleash this disgusting rant blaming the media for reporting on this assessment at all and blaming people in the intelligence agencies for leaking it. Listen to this.
Pete Hegseth (audio voiceover): There’s a reason the president calls out fake news for what it is. These pilots, these refuelers, these fighters, these air defenders—the skill and the courage it took to go into enemy territory flying 36 hours on behalf of the American people and the world to take out a nuclear program is beyond what anyone in this audience can fathom. And then the instinct … the instinct of CNN, the instinct of The New York Times is to try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons, to try to hurt President Trump or our country. They don’t care what the troops think. They don’t care what the world thinks. They want to spin it to try to make him look bad based on a leak. Of course, we’ve all seen plenty of leakers, and what do leakers do? They have agendas.
Sargent: The way Hegseth uses the troops to disparage basic truth seeking by the free press is just despicable. And the idea that he cares about how this reflects on the troops when all he really gives a shit about is how it makes Trump appear is just laughable. That little show was for Trump, who was standing right next to him, and only for Trump. But Brad, you’re a deep-state denizen. What would actually be behind a leak like this? Would it really be about hurting Trump, which again is the only thing they care about? Or would it be more about trying to get the truth out there? What do you think went into this leak?
Moss: So my general premise and default approach in situations like this is to assume it’s a little bit of both. The person who leaked it probably—you can presume, at least for the moment—is at least not a huge fan of the president. And you can also believe at the same time that part of their motive was they felt that the public was being lied to and there needed to be greater transparency on that. Potentially they would void worse policy decisions coming forward, especially as Congress was evaluating what steps it may or may not take in reliance on its own Article 1 powers. So you can assume that the person is probably low- to mid-level ranking; I don’t think this came from a senior official. You can assume that the person has considerable expertise and experience in this field; knows what the information actually showed and what it doesn’t show, particularly with respect to what Trump said, and just couldn’t stand to hear this anymore.
Whether or not that person will ultimately be caught and be punished, it’s entirely possible. Look no further than Reality Winner and what she did during the first Trump administration. She paid for her leak of a single document—which she had done for purposes of transparency, but she also was not a political fan of the president. But she did it for purposes of transparency. She went to jail. That’s the reality of what could possibly happen here. I certainly get, from a national security standpoint, the president, the secretary of defense denouncing the leak in general. Any president is going to do that. Any secretary of defense is going to do that.
But my concern, and you heard some of it in that clip from Hegseth, is the way they’re describing this as an attack on the troops. It’s not attack on the troops. The troops did what they were supposed to do. The guys who flew the jets, people who launched missiles, whatever it was that was involved—they did their job. You don’t have to build them up more. They know what they did. They don’t need a pat on the back. They already did their job. The problem is the opposite of what Hegseth just said. He blamed the media for twisting facts. It’s them, it’s the White House, it’s the Defense Department—and specifically I’m speaking of Hegseth—who are twisting particular pieces of facts to fit a political narrative and not letting the facts speak for themselves. If it was this resounding success, let the facts show that.
Sargent: Exactly. There’s a through line to a lot of this that you got out there, Brad. Let’s listen to some more audio. This one of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): No president in history could have ever dreamed of such a success, and that’s exactly why the fake news media is now trying to demean and undermine the president. And we’ve seen this playbook be run before. You have hostile actors within the intelligence community who illegally leak bits and pieces of an intelligence assessment to push a fake news narrative.
Sargent: Naturally, she has to go hard into the totalitarian propaganda and depict this as the greatest thing any American president has ever done. But that aside, note that she attacks unnamed intelligence officials for the leak, just as Hegseth did. Brad, are we going to see a real purge here, do you think?
Moss: I certainly think you’re going to, at least in the short term, (1) see a very extensive leak investigation, expect that they’re just going to start issuing polygraphs to everyone they can think of that had access to the document, and (2) start seeing restrictions on how much of this is shared, which has its own problems. Putting aside that they’re already going to start restricting what they give to Congress, which has serious separation of powers issues, they’re going to start limiting how much [access] the low-level and mid-level analysts who do the real work of government, especially intelligence agencies, have to things, which is going to undermine the ultimate sufficiency and credibility of the documents that gets submitted to the senior-level people who make the decisions. The abilities and the credibility of what ultimate policymakers do and conclude they will act on is ultimately premised on the work of the low-level intelligence analysts looking at satellite photos, or the low-level and mid-level intelligence analysts analyzing chemical combinations. It’s not done by those senior guys. It’s done by those low-level guys. And if they don’t have the relevant access, out of some desire to just silo everything off, it’s going to weaken the actual product.
Sargent: I want to ask you about that. Can you give us a little insight into what’s going to unfold now with regard to the assessments? When do we start to see other assessments? And is there a serious danger that those will be distorted and politicized? It’s hard to imagine, given the explosive rage that was directed at this one assessment, that this administration will ever officially put out anything that isn’t 100 percent flattering to Trump. Or am I wrong there? Can we trust the process or not?
Moss: So in a normal administration on Earth 2 with whoever as president other than Donald Trump, I’d say yes, you can generally trust the process. Have there been instances in the past with presidents where that got twisted a bit? Yeah, we saw some of that with George W. Bush and some of the intel that came out of there. We heard the reporting about Dick Cheney and how he tried to push things. But generally speaking, I would be trustful of that process to produce the factual data. What the senior-level people interpreted it as and decided to do as a policy matter is a separate issue.
The bigger concern here now on Earth 1 with Donald Trump as president again and with total immunity is that there is going to be a concerted effort to make sure whatever information gets compiled and ultimately documented in the subsequent assessments and is put forth as the official position of DOD, the intelligence community writ large, etc., is going to be premised not on the totality and entirety of the information but on what is politically advantageous to Donald Trump and what fits his political narrative. Will that process be allowed to play out to showcase the actual facts, or is it just going to have to be something that says Donald Trump was right from the beginning, the original assessment was garbage, and he is the greatest president in all of human history? That’s got to be a concern. And this is, in a normal world, what Congress would be worried about because their war powers are implicated and they are supposed to be the ones who conduct that kind of oversight.
Sargent: Well, you get at a really critical point there, which is that one big reason they can get away with shit like this is that they know that the Republican Congress will never look for even one second at any of it.
Moss: Yeah. That was always a concern, especially with the second term. The first term, it was a very different Congress. It was a very different Trump administration in the White House. He didn’t have his own people really yet. He wasn’t expecting to win the first time. He was staffed by all kinds of what I would call more or less establishment people. Even if they were far more conservative than anything Hillary Clinton would have had, you had the Mattises, you had the Barrs, you had people like that you could trust at least understood the process. And he had Congress, which wasn’t beholden to him. Now it is his party. It is his people only, and they are true believers.
You were joking about Karoline Leavitt and doing her North Korean bit. It’s nothing compared to what’s coming out of the spokesperson at state and her whole thing up to and including wearing the pink outfit just like the lady in North Korea and doing nothing but saying Donald Trump leads us all and he is dear leader. So that becomes … our biggest concern is what will Congress do here? You just heard the speaker of the House. I don’t think I’ve ever heard this in my entire life. The speaker of the House saying the War Powers Act is unconstitutional. That’s like throwing aside everything ever since Nixon and saying, By the way, we as Article 1 authorities don’t actually believe our own restrictions on presidential authority because it’s advantageous to us politically now. That is obscenely insane.
Sargent: Well, it’s interesting that you bring up the role of Congress here because some senior Democrats are trying to inject their voices into this and say take this document seriously. Karoline Leavitt had a tweet today where she said something like “the greatest president in all of human history,” “world historical figure,” “totally obliterated the nuclear program,” using exactly the language that Trump wants her to use and so forth. Representative Ted Lieu, who’s in the Democratic leadership, tweeted the following quote, “I highly recommend you read the assessment before you say or post anything else on this topic.” Now, Brad, how do you read that? That’s a serious Democrat trying to let the world know that the administration is gaslighting people about what this classified document really says, right? Lieu gets to read it.
Sargent: Yeah, that’s Ted Lieu trying to be a responsible adult, and he’s trying to do that by interacting [with] what is essentially a child. All credit to Karoline Leavitt, she got to where she is. I don’t know her beyond seeing her come into this role. She’s 27 years old. At 27 years old, I didn’t know a thing in this world, even though allegedly I was apparently a lawyer. I didn’t know a thing yet. At 27, you do not know enough to be the press secretary and certainly not to talk like this. But this is why she was hired. She is a true believer through and through. And we saw out of that first administration that going out there and just being a brazen fraud does not have any problems for you. Look no further than Sarah Huckabee Sanders—infamously went out there after James Comey was fired and said, I’ve received texts and calls from FBI agents thanking me, and then when questioned about it under oath by Mueller said, Oh yeah, I made that whole thing up. Cause this is what they’re instructed to do. If Karoline Leavitt, by any amazing coincidences, ultimately ever [ends up being] questioned about this under oath, I would bet you all the money in my pocket right now versus all the money in your pocket right now she’ll say, I just ran off of talking points I was given, and I was told to make the president look good, and that she knew nothing beyond that.
Sargent: Well, just to close this out on some comic relief, I want to underscore how absurd all this is. The New York Times reported that since Trump started to use the term “obliterated” to describe what his bombing did to Iran’s nuclear program, he has actually been monitoring other officials to be sure they’re using that exact language. And right on cue, Leavitt tweeted out a bunch of statements from numerous administration officials. And you know what? Every one of the statements had the word “obliterated” in it. Where do we go with something like this? How do you predict that this all unfolds from here on out, given the deeply cultlike nature of all this?
Moss: This becomes my concern going forward; no matter what comes out of these next three years, assuming we survive all this in one piece. Going forward, there’s going to be someone else other than Donald Trump as president. What becomes of the presidency, and what becomes of this constitutional republic itself going forward after what we’ve just dealt with for the last decade? We had a concept. However fringe, however strained it was, we had a concept of there are facts and there are opinions. And with Donald Trump, there is no such thing as facts. Everything is your own opinion. And my opinion is the only one that matters. And so if the next Democrat comes into office at some point, are they going to take up that mantle and just say, I’m just going to play Trump’s game right back at the Republicans? And are we going to go down that path? That becomes my biggest concern. Not that Donald Trump’s going to become a dictator and initiate a coup; [it] is that what we have seen here is the basically the dawning of the dismantling of what was our constitutional republic. That it’ll slowly circle the drain. It’ll take more than our lifetime, no doubt, but that this was the golden age in a different sense to what Trump thinks, and we’re going to slowly start withering away because we have no such thing as facts anymore.
Sargent: There’s just no conception of the public good at all operating with any of these people. It’s all about Donald Trump, and anyone who tries to go out there and seek facts, like the free press is doing—trying to inform the public about whether a major operation by Donald Trump worked—that has to just be only about Trump as well, right? Only in a negative way. That to me is what we’re really seeing here. It’s an ethic that’s just deeply destructive to any understanding of governance as we should hope it should be.
Moss: Yeah, it comes out of this simple fact: Facts and truth are boring. Propaganda? Sexy and fun as hell. And you could outweigh and overcome boring facts every single day with sexy overdramatic propaganda. Look no further than Twitter. Look no further than the president’s use of social media to amazing political effect. Look no further than what’s going on on TikTok. It is so extremely boring to read the Mueller report. It is so much more fun to watch a 35-second video on TikTok.
Sargent: No question, although it really is interesting how incredibly damaging the facts that were put out in this report have been to Trump. There comes a point when all the TikToking and all the tweeting and all that stuff just breaks down in the face of reality.
Moss: And that’s where we are. And I honestly don’t know. I don’t know where we go from here. And I don’t think anyone truly does have a sense of, Do we find a way back to it? And we’re going to have to just hold onto the rails for the next three years, try to get through this and then see what comes on the other side.
Sargent: Bradley Moss, thank you so much for creeping out of the bowels of the deep state to talk to us, man. It was super illuminating. We really appreciate your time.
Moss: From my undisclosed location.
Sargent: Good to talk to you, Brad.
Moss: Take it easy.