“…Clearly we hit three important sites and hats off to the skill of our military in conducting those operations. But I think it’s really premature to draw any general conclusions.”
View the full interview HERE.
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), member of the Senate’s bipartisan National Security Working Group, joined ABC News Live’s Kayna Whitworth following the classified Senate briefing on President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Iranian nuclear facilities.
Key Excerpts:
On his takeaway from the intelligence briefing:
John Ratcliffe was involved in the briefing, as well as Secretary Hegseth, Secretary Rubio, and General Caine. And I think it was a useful briefing. Some of the briefers were more useful, more helpful than others. We got, I think, little more than a political spin from Secretary Hegseth, but others had substantive things to say. And I think at the end of the day, my takeaway is we still don’t know a great deal in terms of the damage assessment.
We really don’t, I think, have a good understanding, good comprehensive understanding, of how much the Iranian program was set back. I mean, clearly, we hit three important sites and hats off to the skill of our military in conducting those operations. But I think it’s really premature to draw any general conclusions. Certainly, the conclusions the president announced right from the get-go were way premature. But that is, I guess, to be expected from the president. But we demand more from the intelligence community. We want some precision in understanding how much this set back the Iranian program or didn’t set back the program.
On needing more information to determine the status of Iran’s nuclear program:
I think what we got was still very early, very preliminary information. There are really two timelines that are key here, and they’re often conflated. Sometimes they were conflated during the briefing. They’re often conflated in terms of the public discussion. And that is, how long would it have taken the Iranians to enrich the uranium to weapons grade? And the other is, how long would it take them to develop the mechanism of the bomb?
And there were certain estimates, public estimates, of those timelines before the strike. And what I’m most interested in is how have those timelines been affected? And you have to really analyze both of them to get a sense of what it would take the Iranians to break out and actually develop a nuclear weapon. So, on that score, still, we need a lot more information to make any kind of determination of whether the Iranian program was set back by a short period, a middle period, or a longer period.
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