Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi admitted to <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/video/iran-foreign-minister-claims-us-strikes-heavily-seriously-damaged-nuclear-sites/">CBS News</a> that the Iranian nuclear facility at Fordow, contrary to media reports based on thin intelligence reports, had indeed been “seriously and heavily damaged.”
“No one exactly knows what has transpired in Fordow,” Araghchi said. “That being said, what we know so far is that the facilities have been seriously and heavily damaged. The Atomic Energy Organization of the Islamic Republic of Iran is currently undertaking evaluation and assessment of the report, of which will be submitted to the government.”
Asked whether Iranian inspectors had been able to access Fordow or whether they were still trying to access it, he answered, “The Atomic Energy Organization of the Islamic Republic of Iran will have to respond to that question because it is they who are currently doing the evaluation and assessment.”
Araghchi was also asked whether President Trump’s claim was accurate that the Iranian nuclear facilities, which the U.S. struck, had been “obliterated.”
“It appears they have been heavily and seriously damaged. However, I would like to reiterate that I do not have accurate information regarding the damage. We need to wait until the reports come in to see whether or not they will be able to be relaunched or if they will be relaunched,” he answered.
Despite the fact that Iran had enriched its uranium to a level only appropriate for nuclear weapons rather than peaceful energy purposes, Araghchi insisted that Iran only had a “peaceful nuclear program,” declaring, “Iran has undergone heavy sanctions because of its peaceful nuclear program &#8230; Iran’s peaceful nuclear program has turned into a matter of national pride and glory.”
“Iran has pursued uranium, which it is currently enriching up to a level of 60 percent in spinning machines called gas centrifuges,” the Foundation for Defense of Democracies <a href="https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/05/21/9-myths-about-irans-uranium-enrichment-program/">noted</a>. “Once that level is achieved, Tehran has accomplished 99 percent of the <a href="https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2023/08/25/irans-nuclear-concession-may-not-be-one-at-all/">effort</a> to make weapons-grade uranium. &#8230; Despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars on enrichment, <a href="https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/25/03/gov2025-8.pdf">enriching</a> thousands of kilograms of uranium domestically at three enrichment facilities, and claiming it has an ‘<a href="https://x.com/IranNuances/status/1919440662673432778">industrial</a>’ enrichment program — one that can fuel nuclear power reactors — Iran has yet to fuel its sole operating nuclear power plant at Bushehr.”
“Our people will not easily back down from enrichment and not put it away,” Araghchi trumpeted, then claimed that Islamic religious principles forbade Iran developing nuclear weaponry as he said, “According to the fatwa, that is a religious decree by the Supreme leader of the Islamic Revolution, nuclear weaponry has no place whatsoever in the security doctrine of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Overview of Fordow Enrichment Complex  June 29, 2025

Media Fail: Iranian Foreign Minister Admits Fordow Was ‘Seriously And Heavily Damaged’

Fordow

Iran

Iran Airstrike

Nuclear Weapons

The legacy media have stonewalled letting President Trump have the win he deserves for his strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities. What President Trump did in Iran is one of the most historic wins of my lifetime.
Just to recap, Israel launched an overwhelming aerial assault on the Iranian facilities, nuclear and missile-based. They were going after ballistic missile development factories in Iran — their ballistic missile stockpiles, their missile launchers — as well as their nuclear facilities.
For nearly two weeks, Israel hammered the Iranians. But there was one facility in particular, Fordo, which was some 250-300 meters underground. And Israel did not have the ordnance capable of penetrating that facility. So President Trump authorized a B-2 strike using 30,000 pound bombs on Fordow, and in his words, “obliterated” the site.
The media won&#8217;t let that be the case, that President Trump used force to end the Iranian nuclear program and then declared the war over — and it was over.
It was, in fact, a historic win, and a win that we haven&#8217;t seen in American foreign policy in my lifetime: One strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities, a complete reshuffling of the deck in the Middle East with Israel as a regional powerhouse and Iran a supplicant, and no continuous war between Israel and Iran, no hot war continuing.
With no American casualties, by the way.
An amazing accomplishment.
But the media just won&#8217;t let President Trump have it. They won&#8217;t. They keep claiming over and over and over that, actually, maybe Fordo wasn&#8217;t destroyed. In fact, Fordo is fine. Maybe the Israeli-American effort was completely for naught, they claim.
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They have no basis upon which to say this, other than the word of Ayatollah Khamenei, who has been tweeting that everything is hunky dory from his bunker, presumably in Tehran, <a href="https://x.com/khamenei_ir/status/1938180907887698222">claiming</a> with astonishing chutzpah: 
<blockquote>With all that commotion and all those claims, the Zionist regime was practically knocked out and crushed under the blows of the Islamic Republic.</blockquote>
You have to be high on drugs to believe this. He was literally hiding in a bunker for the entirety of the war. His regime was so weak that the Israeli Air Force was flying continuous sorties unhindered over Iranian airspace, with zero casualties on the IAF side, zero, for two weeks.
And yet <a href="https://x.com/khamenei_ir/status/1938184845873844536">he says</a> that, in reality, the “Zionist regime,” Israel, was practically knocked out and crushed:
<blockquote>My congratulations on our dear Iran’s victory over the US regime. The US regime entered the war directly because it felt that if it didn’t, the Zionist regime would be completely destroyed. It entered the war in an effort to save that regime but achieved nothing.</blockquote>
The Baghdad Bob aspect in the Middle East is always absurd to Westerners. Ayatollah Khomeini trying to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, at least in terms of public perception, does not mean that he was not, in fact, hammered or that the nuclear program is intact.
But Khamenei <a href="https://x.com/khamenei_ir/status/1938185956793761808">tweeted out:</a>
<blockquote>The Islamic Republic delivered a heavy slap to the US’s face. It attacked and inflicted damage on the Al-Udeid Air Base, which is one of the key US bases in the region.</blockquote>
Nope. Actually, he called and he whined and begged the Qataris and the Americans to allow him to send a few missiles at the base, none of which actually hit.
Why am I telling you what Khamenei is saying? Because you&#8217;re hearing it echoed by the media. The New York Times and CNN reported that there was a Defense Intelligence Agency estimate that Fordo had not been knocked out, not been obliterated, not even been severely damaged.
It turned out that that was a low-confidence assessment by one of 18 intelligence agencies under the DIA. It didn’t matter. The media ran with it anyway. This became the top story in the media.
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How do we know that it&#8217;s stupid? According to the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/world/middleeast/centrifuges-fordo-damage-iran.html">UN nuclear watchdog</a> head, the director general of the IAEA, there was “no escaping significant physical damage after the U.S. strike on the Iranian facility.” Barak Ravid of Axios, a front man for Left-wing and isolationist agitprop coming out from various leak-driven parts of various administrations, <a href="https://x.com/BarakRavid/status/1938229914244682140">tweeted</a>, “I told Jake Tapper that a senior Israeli intelligence official told me that other than the word ‘obliterated’ the reality regarding the results of the attack on Iran is much closer to where Trump says it is than to where the initial DIA report said it was.”
All of this came to a head yesterday when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth did a press conference. He crushed the fake news that&#8217;s been targeting President Trump, declaring:
<blockquote>Because you cheer against Trump so hard — it&#8217;s like in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump because you want him not to be successful so bad — you have to cheer against the efficacy of these strikes. You have to hope maybe they weren&#8217;t effective. Maybe the way the Trump administration represented them isn&#8217;t true. So let&#8217;s take half-truths, spun information, leaked information, and then spin it. Spin it in every way we can to try to cause doubt and manipulate the public mind over whether or not our brave pilots were successful.
This was an historically successful attack. We should celebrate it as Americans, and it gives us a chance to have peace, a chance to have a deal and an opportunity to prevent a nuclear Iran, which is something President Trump talked about for 20 years.</blockquote>
He was correct.
Hegseth wasn’t done. He called on Jennifer Griffin of Fox News, who&#8217;d been one of the people who reported this particular DIA assessment.
<blockquote>Griffin: Do you have certainty that all the highly enriched uranium was inside the Fordo mountain, or some of it, because there were satellite photos that showed more than a dozen trucks there two days in advance. Are you certain none of that highly enriched uranium was moved?</blockquote>
<blockquote>Hegseth: Of course, we&#8217;re watching every single aspect. But, Jennifer, you&#8217;ve been about the worst, the one who misrepresents the most intentionally what the president says.
Griffin: I was reporting about the ventilation shafts on Saturday night. And in fact, I was the first to describe the B-2 bombers, the refueling, the entire mission with great accuracy. So I take issue with that.
Hegseth: I appreciate you acknowledging that this was the most successful mission, based on operational security, that this department has done since you&#8217;ve been here. I appreciate that. So, we&#8217;re looking at all aspects of intelligence and making sure we have a sense of what was what.</blockquote>
Hegseth got feisty with the media, and a lot of it was deserved. Some of the questions he was asked were absolutely ridiculous. He was asked by a reporter about the fact that he had suggested that it was “brave boys” who flew the plane when one of the people in the plane was a woman, and here was his response:
<blockquote>So when I say something like our boys and bombers, see, this is the kind of thing the press does, right? Of course. The chairman mentioned a female bomber pilot. That&#8217;s fantastic. She&#8217;s fantastic. She&#8217;s a hero. I want more female bomber pilots. I hope the men and women of our country sign up to do such brave and audacious things.
But when you spin it as, because I say “our boys,” — and bombers is a common phrase — I&#8217;ll keep saying things like that, whether they&#8217;re men or women. Very proud of that female pilot. Just like I&#8217;m very proud of those male pilots. And I don&#8217;t care if it&#8217;s a male or a female in that cockpit, and the American people don&#8217;t care. But it&#8217;s the obsession with race and gender in this department that&#8217;s changed priorities. And we don&#8217;t do that anymore. We don&#8217;t play your little games.</blockquote>
You could see how deeply, deeply annoyed Hegseth was along with the entire administration, having to explain that when you drop 12 bunker-busters on an Iranian nuclear site and destroy their nuclear facilities — or at the very least render them completely inoperable — and then the media lie about it and seek any speck of information to discredit that — it is deeply annoying.
And it should be deeply annoying. The media refuse to give President Trump the win he deeply deserves.
Simply put, they are trash.

Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth Holds Pentagon Press Conference On Iran Strikes

Hegseth Wrecks Trump-Hating Media

Ben Shapiro

Department of Defense

Legacy Media

Middle East

Opinion

Pentagon

Pete Hegseth

President Trump

President Donald Trump unloaded on the legacy media after a Thursday morning press conference — which was meant to correct the record on the U.S. military&#8217;s recent strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities — held by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Trump took to his Truth Social platform to praise Hegseth for delivering one of the &#8220;most professional&#8221; press conferences he&#8217;d ever seen and called for the media outlets that had pushed ahead with leaked intelligence to &#8220;fire everyone involved.&#8221;
Trump prefaced the press conference — which he&#8217;d teased just a day earlier — with <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114749580476669594">another post</a>, saying, &#8220;Rumor is that the Failing New York Times and Fake News CNN will be firing the reporters who made up the FAKE stories on the Iran Nuclear sites because they got it so wrong. Let&#8217;s see what happens?&#8221;
Once the press conference ended, he took a sharper tone.
&#8220;One of the greatest, most professional, and most &#8216;confirming&#8217; News Conferences I have ever seen! The Fake News should fire everyone involved in this Witch Hunt, and apologize to our great warriors, and everyone else!&#8221; the president <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114749815668266552">posted</a>, piggy-backing on Hegseth&#8217;s comments.
Hegseth had said during his remarks that media outlets seemed so desperate to attack Trump that they didn&#8217;t care if the framing of their stories undermined the brave actions of the men and women of the United States military who had actually carried out the mission.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Thank you, Mr. President. <a href="https://t.co/oxHBnXLEB4">pic.twitter.com/oxHBnXLEB4</a>
— Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (@SecDef) <a href="https://twitter.com/SecDef/status/1938224791741219296?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 26, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
The president added <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114749839848044904">his own comments</a> clarifying some of what was seen at the Iranian nuclear site — cars and trucks that some in the media have alleged might have been moving nuclear materials out of the site prior to the attack.
&#8220;The cars and small trucks at the site were those of concrete workers trying to cover up the top of the shafts. Nothing was taken out of facility. Would take too long, too dangerous, and very heavy and hard to move!&#8221; he declared.
Trump doubled down, attacking the media again a short time later, <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114750055630968441">posting</a> in all capital letters, &#8220;FAKE NEWS REPORTERS FROM CNN &amp; THE NEW YORK TIMES SHOULD BE FIRED, IMMEDIATELY!!! BAD PEOPLE WITH EVIL INTENTIONS!!!&#8221;

Trump

‘Fire Everyone Involved’: Trump Unloads On Media After Hegseth Presser On Iran Strikes

'Fire Everyone Involved': Trump Unloads On Media After Defense Department Presser On Iran Strikes

Donald Trump

Executive

Israel

Media

Politics

At a Thursday press conference with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, President Donald Trump’s top general, Dan “Razin’” Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke of the emotional moment when American pilots returned home to their loved ones following the strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, recalling “flags flying and tears flowing.”
“When the crews went to work on Friday, they kissed their loved ones goodbye, not knowing when or if they would be home,” he stated. “Late on Saturday night, their families became aware of what was happening, and on Sunday, when those jets returned&#8230;their families were there. Flags flying and tears flowing.”
“I have chills, literally, talking about this,” he declared.
“The jets rejoined into a formation of four airplanes followed by a formation of three and came up overhead Whiteman (Air Force Base), proudly in a traffic pattern, pitching out to land, right over the base and landing to the incredible cheers of their families, who sacrifice and serve right alongside their family members. Like I said, there were a lot of flags and a lot of tears,” he said.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
. <a href="https://twitter.com/thejointstaff?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@thejointstaff</a> &quot;Crews went to work on Friday; they kissed their loved ones goodbye, not knowing when or if they would be home.
Late on Saturday night, their families became aware of what was happening, and on Sunday, when those jets returned from Whiteman, their families were… <a href="https://t.co/xcA79ecLFR">pic.twitter.com/xcA79ecLFR</a>
&mdash; DOD Rapid Response (@DODResponse) <a href="https://twitter.com/DODResponse/status/1938217713756778776?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 26, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Last Sunday, Caine detailed how the strike was conducted, stating:
<blockquote>
At midnight Friday into Saturday morning a large B2 strike package comprised of bombers launched from the continental United States. As part of a plan to maintain tactical surprise, part of the package proceeded to the west and into the Pacific as a decoy, a deception effort known only to an extremely small number of planners and key leaders here in Washington and in Tampa.
The main strike package comprised of seven B2 Spirit bombers, each with two crewmembers, proceeded quietly to the East with minimal communications. Throughout the 18-hour flight into the target area. the aircraft completed multiple inflight refuelings. Once over land, the B2‘s linked up with escort and support aircraft in a complex tightly-timed maneuver requiring exact synchronization across multiple platforms in a narrow piece of airspace, all done with minimal communication communications.
This type of integration is exactly what our joint force does better than anyone else in the world.
At approximately 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time last night and just prior to the strike package entering Iran, a U.S. submarine in the central command area of responsibility launched more than two dozen Tomahawk plane attack cruise missiles against key surface infrastructure targets at Esfahan. As the Operation Midnight Hammer strike package entered Iranian airspace, the U.S. employed several deception tactics, including decoys, as the fourth and fifth generation aircraft pushed out in front of the strike package at high altitude and high speed, sweeping in front of the package for enemy fighters and surface-to-air missile threats.
</blockquote>
RELATED: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/retained-the-element-of-surprise-trumps-top-general-gives-details-on-operation-midnight-hammer">&#8216;Retained The Element Of Surprise&#8217;: Trump&#8217;s Top General Gives Details On Operation Midnight Hammer</a>

Pete Hegseth – Dan Caine holds a joint press conference in DC

‘Flags Flying…Tears Flowing’: Gen. ‘Razin’ Caine Honors Pilots’ Families After Heroic Iran Strike

Dan Caine

Military

Pilots

Menu

Iran Airstrike

Media Fail: Iranian Foreign Minister Admits Fordow Was ‘Seriously And Heavily Damaged’

Hegseth Wrecks Trump-Hating Media

‘Fire Everyone Involved’: Trump Unloads On Media After Hegseth Presser On Iran Strikes

‘Flags Flying…Tears Flowing’: Gen. ‘Razin’ Caine Honors Pilots’ Families After Heroic Iran Strike