The Latest: Hegseth praises US attack on Iran but offers few details on the strikes’ impact

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine held a Thursday morning news conference to respond to an early leaked intelligence report suggesting U.S. strikes against Iran likely put the country back mere months.

President Donald Trump has insisted the U.S. strikes delivered a “devastating” attack and that questioning his assessment of the strike was not only unpatriotic but also makes the pilots who dropped the bombs “very upset.”

Drawing reliable conclusions about the impact of the U.S. strikes is difficult only days after they took place.

Here’s the latest:

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker was at a Thursday morning rally launching his bid for a third term in office next year.

“I’m running for governor today because I want to be governor of Illinois,” the Democrat told reporters.

Pritzker, a vocal critic of Trump who was a top contender as Kamala Harris’ running mate in 2024, has often been mentioned as a potential presidential candidate for his party.

Pritzker also beat back against Trump on Thursday, calling the president “a megalomaniac narcissist” and the GOP “fascist freak show fanatics” aiming to end democracy.

“Our story doesn’t have a king telling us what to do,” he said as hundreds of supporters cheered “JB” at Chicago’s Grand Crossing Park Field House, where Pritzker announced his first gubernatorial bid in 2017.

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says the country is pulling its support from the vaccines alliance Gavi, saying the organization has “ignored the science” and “lost the public trust.”

A video of Kennedy’s short speech was shown to a Gavi meeting in Brussels on Wednesday, where the organization that has paid for more than 1 billion children to be vaccinated through routine immunization programs was hoping to raise at least $9 billion for the next five years.

Kennedy, a longtime vaccine skeptic, mentioned Gavi’s partnership with the World Health Organization during COVID-19, accusing them of silencing “dissenting views” and “legitimate questions” about vaccine safety.

Gavi said in a statement Thursday that its “utmost concern is the health and safety of children,” adding that any decision it makes on vaccines to buy is done in accordance with recommendations issued by WHO’s expert vaccine group.

The president and his allies are taking a liking to the “Daddy” nickname, inspired by comments made by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, and are now selling $35 orange T-shirts with his image and the word.

The new merchandise benefits his fundraising efforts linked to his and Vice President JD Vance’s leadership political action committees and the Republican National Committee.

In a news conference with Trump, Rutte said “daddy has to sometimes use strong language” when the two were talking about his dealings with warring Israel and Iran.

The White House shared a mashup video on social media with highlights from the NATO summit in the Netherlands and the soundtrack of Usher’s song “Hey Daddy (Daddy’s Home).”

Senators are set to meet with top national security officials Thursday as some lawmakers question Trump’s decision to bomb three Iranian nuclear sites and whether those strikes were ultimately successful.

The classified briefing, originally scheduled for Tuesday, also comes as the Senate is expected to vote this week on a resolution that would require congressional approval if Trump were to order another strike on Iran.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are expected to brief the senators.

Democrats, and some Republicans, have said the White House overstepped its authority when it failed to seek the advice of Congress. They also want to know more about the intelligence Trump relied on when he authorized the attacks.

President Trump’s fights with the intelligence community were a running theme of his first term as he raged against an investigation into his campaign’s alleged links to Russia. Now, a sequel is playing out as Trump battles to shape the public’s understanding of his foreign policy gamble in Iran.

An early U.S. intelligence assessment said Iran’s nuclear program has been set back only a few months after American strikes on three sites last weekend. The Republican president has rejected the report and pronounced the program “completely and fully obliterated.”

The dispute is unlikely to fade anytime soon. Top administration officials are pressing Trump’s case, with Hegseth scolding the media at a Pentagon briefing Thursday for “breathlessly” focusing on an intelligence report he downplayed as preliminary. Briefings also are scheduled for lawmakers, though the White House plans to limit the sharing of classified information after the initial assessment leaked this week.

The ruling handed down Thursday comes amid a wider Republican-backed push to defund the country’s biggest abortion provider.

The case centers on funding for other health care services Planned Parenthood provides in South Carolina, but the ruling could have broader implications for Medicaid patients.

Public health care money generally can’t be used to pay for abortions. Medicaid patients go to Planned Parenthood for things like contraception, cancer screenings and pregnancy testing, in part because it can be tough to find a doctor who takes the publicly funded insurance, the organization has said.

South Carolina’s Republican governor says no taxpayer money should go the organization. The budget bill backed by Trump in Congress would also cut Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood. That could force the closure of about 200 centers, most of them in states where abortion is legal, the organization has said.

“One of the greatest, most professional, and most ‘confirming’ News Conferences I have ever seen!” the president wrote on social media. “The Fake News should fire everyone involved in this Witch Hunt, and apologize to our great warriors, and everyone else!”

Trump also emphasized his belief that Iran did not remove nuclear material from its facilities before the U.S. attacked.

“Would take too long, too dangerous, and very heavy and hard to move!” he wrote.

The Senate parliamentarian has advised that the Medicaid provider tax overhaul that’s central to Trump’s big tax cut and spending bill doesn’t adhere to procedural rules, delivering a crucial blow to Republicans rushing to finish the massive package this week.

The guidance Thursday from the parliamentarian is rarely ignored and forces GOP leaders to consider options. Senate leaders could try to revise or strip it from the package. Otherwise, the provision could be challenged during floor votes, requiring a 60-vote threshold to keep it, a tall order in the narrowly split Senate. Democrats are unified against the Republican president’s bill.

Hegseth criticized his former Fox News colleague, Jennifer Griffin, as “about the worst, the one who misrepresents the most intentionally what the president says” in his Pentagon news conference Thursday.

Griffin, Fox’s chief national security correspondent, said “I take issue with that” and defended her reporting on the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Hegseth, a Fox News anchor before Trump appointed him defense secretary, repeatedly criticized the media for its reporting on an initial assessment of the weekend’s bombing that questioned how much damage was done to Iran’s nuclear program.

Griffin had asked Hegseth about whether there was any certainty that highly enriched uranium was stored at the mountain bunker bombed by the U.S., given satellite photos that showed more than a dozen trucks were seen there two days in advance.

“Of course, we’re watching every single aspect,” Hegseth said. “But, Jennifer, you’ve been about the worst, the one who misrepresents the most intentionally what the president says.”

1 p.m. – Press secretary Karoline Leavitt will host a news briefing

4 p.m. – Trump will participate in a “One, Big, Beautiful Event” related to his signature bill

“It’s scary that a person with such a view is serving as leader,” said Masao Tomonaga, a survivor from Nagasaki.

Nagasaki Mayor Shiro Suzuki said the “use of atomic weapons should never be tolerated for any purpose.”

Earlier this week, Trump said the U.S. attack on Iranian nuclear facilities helped end the recent war in the Middle East like the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan brought World War II to a close.

“How can the president of America say such a thing? I just don’t understand,” said Toshiyuki Mimaki, who was a child in Hiroshima when the bombing took place. “What he said is totally unacceptable.”

Mimaki is a leader of Nihon Hidankyo, a group of survivors that won a Nobel Peace Prize last year.

The Hiroshima city assembly on Thursday unanimously adopted a resolution calling for the peaceful settlement of all conflicts, saying Trump’s remark apparently justifying the atomic bombing “cannot be overlooked or accepted,” Japan’s NHK national television reported.

That’s according to the Commerce Department in an unexpected downgrade from its previous estimate and came as President Trump’s trade wars disrupted business.

First-quarter growth sank under a surge of imports as companies in the United States rushed to bring in foreign goods before Trump could impose tariffs on them. The Commerce Department previously estimated the economy fell 0.2% in the first quarter. Economists had forecast no change in the department’s third and final estimate.

The January-March drop in gross domestic product – the nation’s output of goods and services – reversed a 2.4% increase in the last three months of 2024 and marked the first time in three years that the economy contracted. Imports expanded 37.9%, fastest since 2020, and pushed GDP down by nearly 4.7 percentage points.

The Pentagon briefing included a detailed narrative about military tactics and hardware. However, it was short on information about how much the attack setback the Iranian nuclear program.

It’s unclear how quickly Iran could repair the damage or rebuild its capabilities elsewhere. There have also been questions about whether Iran was able to move its enriched uranium before the U.S. strikes.

Hegseth said he didn’t think that happened.

“I’m not aware of any intelligence that I’ve reviewed that says things were not where they were supposed to be – moved or otherwise,” he said.

Military officials have said it will take time to fully understand the impact of U.S. strikes on Iran, and there was little in the way of new information about their damage.

But Hegseth said they decided to hold Thursday morning’s news conference because “there was a great deal of irresponsible reporting” based on a preliminary intelligence assessment. He criticized “biased leaks to biased publications.”

“If you want to know what’s going on at Fordo, you better go there and get a big shovel,” he said.

The top U.S. military official recounted in detail the Iranian missile attacks on a U.S. military base in Qatar.

The description from Gen. Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, appeared aimed at shifting the conversation from questions about political leadership and overall strategy to heroic narratives about individual U.S. service members.

He said roughly 44 American service members responsible for defending the entire base were present as rounds of Patriot missiles were launched. Caine says Qatar joined in the successful American defense of what he called the largest single Patriot engagement in U.S. military history.

The defense secretary minimized the importance of a preliminary intelligence assessment that concluded U.S. strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities had damaged but not permanently destroyed them.

Hegseth scolded the media for “breathlessly” focusing on an assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency even though the DIA is part of the Defense Department.

He said the assessment was preliminary and had not been coordinated with other agencies in the intelligence community. He said other intelligence assessments have been more bullish in their assessments on damage of the sites.

The president seems to be monitoring the Pentagon news conference, posting about it on social media. “Watch it!” he wrote.

He also baselessly suggested that media outlets that reported on the intelligence assessment “will be firing the reporters who made up the FAKE stories.”

Trump has been fixated on coverage of the U.S. strikes, which could determine how American voters view his decision to get involved in the latest war in the Middle East.

The news conference began with Hegseth, a former Fox News host, criticizing the media for “hunting for scandals all the time.”

He accused reporters of failing to acknowledge “historic moments” like improved military recruiting and increased spending on European defense by U.S. allies on the continent.

He then shifted to attacking the “fake news” for reporting on a preliminary assessment about the impact of recent U.S. strikes on Iran.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine assembled this morning to push the president’s claims that the recent U.S. attack “obliterated” Iranian nuclear facilities.

A preliminary assessment, produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency, said American bombs and missiles caused a setback of only a few months. Trump has rejected this conclusion, lashing out at the news media for reporting on it and marshaling his administration to support his version of events.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan made the comments late Wednesday on a flight back from the NATO summit, where he met with Trump.

“Our ultimate goal is to host a leaders-level meeting in our country and to build the peace that we long for,” Erdogan said, according to a transcript of his comments made available on Thursday.

He also quoted Trump as expressing willingness to participate in peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in Turkey, if Russian President Vladimir Putin also agrees to attend.

Erdogan quoted Trump as saying: “If Russian President Vladimir Putin comes to Istanbul or Ankara for a solution, I will also come to Istanbul or Ankara.”

Russian and Ukrainian delegations, meeting in Istanbul in late May and in June, agreed to swap thousands of dead and seriously wounded troops but made no progress toward ending the 3-year-old war.

Despite suggestions of a possible leaders’ summit, Putin did not attend the talks, sending a low-level delegation instead.