Classified briefing on impact of Iran strikes leaves senators split

Senators left a classified briefing about the impact of U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities split along party lines, with Republicans saying it reinforced their belief that it was effective and some Democrats complaining that it did not fully answer their questions.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, briefed senators after days of complaints from Democrats that the administration had not filled them in on how badly strikes last weekend damaged Iran’s nuclear program.

Several Republican senators emerged from the Thursday briefing saying it backed up Ratcliffe’s public assessment Wednesday that the program had been severely damaged. But Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the briefing raised more questions than it answered and that he would push for more details.

“What was clear from today’s briefing is that there is no coherent strategy, no endgame, no plan,” Schumer said on the Senate floor after the briefing. “What are we doing?”

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said after the briefing that it appeared to him that Iran’s nuclear program had been set back only a handful of months. His conclusion echoed a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency assessment that leaked this week, undercutting President Donald Trump’s claims that the strikes had obliterated Iran’s nuclear program.

“The president was deliberately misleading the public when he said the program was obliterated,” Murphy told reporters. “It is certain that there is still significant capability and significant equipment that remain.”

Other Democratic senators were less critical. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said it was impossible to determine how badly Iran’s nuclear ambitions had been damaged without more intelligence.

“Certainly this mission was successful insofar as it extensively destroyed and perhaps severely damaged and set back the Iranian nuclear arms program,” Blumenthal told reporters. “But how long and how much really remains to be determined by the intelligence community itself.”

Some Republicans spoke as if they had attended a different briefing.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a longtime advocate of striking Iran, said he thought “obliterated” was an appropriate word to use. And Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the strikes had caused “catastrophic damage.”

“If you look at the whole span of what happened over 12 days — the targeting of Iran’s nuclear scientists, the underground bunkers, the centrifuges, the centrifuge manufacturing sites, the gas and metal conversion sites — that’s why we’re confident, since all of those are single points of failure in an effort to get a nuclear weapon, that we have had an extraordinary success,” Cotton told reporters, referring to the duration of Israel’s war with Iran.

The administration has pushed back aggressively against the leaked assessment’s conclusion that the strikes had set back Iran’s nuclear program by months.

Ratcliffe said Wednesday that several Iranian nuclear facilities had been “destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years.” And Hegseth dismissed the leaked assessment in a Thursday morning news conference as “low-confidence” and cited the Israel Atomic Energy Commission’s determination that the strikes set back Iran’s nuclear program by years.

The White House also plans to limit how much classified intelligence it shares with Congress in response to the leak.

“This administration wants to ensure that classified intelligence is not ending up in irresponsible hands and that people who have the privilege of viewing this top-secret classified information are being responsible with it,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday.

Schumer called on the White House on Wednesday to “immediately undo” its plans to limit intelligence sharing with Congress. But Ratcliffe told senators in the briefing that he had heard nothing about those plans, according to Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.).

Sen. Mark R. Warner (Virginia), the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, asked the administration officials who briefed senators whether they had been instructed to restrict information to Congress. They said no, Warner said.

“I am not concerned at this point that the administration is going to cut off the sharing of intelligence with the [Senate Intelligence] Committee or with me,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a member of the committee, said after the briefing.

The briefing came as Democrats have clashed with the administration over war powers. Many Democrats have fumed that the administration did not seek authorization from Congress before bombing Iran and did not move faster to fill in lawmakers on the strikes once them happened — but they have split on how to push back.

Most House Democrats voted to dismiss an effort by Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) to impeach Trump for striking Iran without consulting Congress — but 79 Democrats voted to advance it.

“Yes, it’s probably wrong for the president not to come to Congress,” Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the former House speaker, told reporters this week when asked about the impeachment effort. But “we can’t ignore what is at stake, which is our national security to make sure Iran does not have a nuclear weapon and our friendship with Israel.”

The Senate is set to vote this week on a resolution from Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) to block Trump from using military force against Iran without congressional authorization, but its prospects are uncertain after Trump helped broker a fragile ceasefire this week between Iran and Israel, ending the conflict at least temporarily.

No Republicans have committed publicly to voting for it. And Kaine has said he expects one Democrat — Sen. John Fetterman (Pennsylvania), an outspoken supporter of Israel — to oppose it.

Fetterman defended the effectiveness of the strikes ahead of the briefing. “To those who were ‘unimpressed’ or borderline gloating on a leak: Operation Midnight Hammer worked,” Fetterman wrote Thursday, citing comments from Rafael Mariano Grossi of the International Atomic Energy Agency on French radio that the centrifuges at Iran’s Fordow uranium enrichment facility were no longer operational. “I’ve been calling for and fully supported those strikes, and it made the world safer. It should transcend partisan politics.”

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Marianna Sotomayor contributed.