Ayatollah Ali Khamenei taunted Donald Trump over a leaked intelligence report that said the U.S. attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities weren’t as devastating as the president had claimed.
CNN and The New York Times reported on Tuesday that a top-secret Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment believed the U.S.’s June 22 bunker-buster barrage “did not destroy” Iran’s core nuclear infrastructure and likely set the program back by only “a few months.”
In a televised address on state television Thursday, the supreme leader crowed from his bunker that America “didn’t achieve much,” despite Trump’s “showmanship.”
Khamenei boasted that Iran had “delivered a hand slap to America’s face” with its retaliatory missile strike on a U.S. base in Qatar and said the country would “never surrender.”
“The Islamic Republic was victorious and, in retaliation, delivered a hand slap to America’s face,” he said, referring to Iran’s missile attack on Monday on an American base in Qatar in which no one was killed.
Then Khamenei doubled down on X, warning: “The fact that the Islamic Republic has access to key US centers in the region and can take action whenever it deems necessary is a significant matter.
“Such an action can be repeated in the future too. Should any aggression occur, the enemy will definitely pay a heavy price.”
Khamenei vanished from public view on June 13—when Israel’s blitz on Iran’s nuclear sites, senior commanders, and scientists sent him scurrying to an undisclosed hideout.
But the Iranian leader emerged Thursday to gleefully goad Trump, who is sure to be enraged, having been in meltdown since the Pentagon-based DIA’s report somehow found its way into the hands of the media.
The dossier contradicted Trump’s earlier claims that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
Inside the West Wing, Trump has turned the leak into a full-blown “fake news” vendetta—posting through the night at his usual suspects.
He used Truth Social to post, “FAKE NEWS CNN IS SO DISGUSTING AND INCOMPETENT. SOME OF THE DUMBEST ANCHORS IN THE BUSINESS!”
Hours later, Trump singled out the channel’s reporter Natasha Bertrand, raging that she should be “thrown out like a dog” for reporting the DIA’s findings.
In a bizarre rant, he also claimed that those reporting that the strikes had not been quite as successful as he had led the world to believe were being mean to the “hero pilots” involved.
MAGA world remains split over Saturday’s attack, which came days after Israel launched its own assault on the pariah state.
While those close to Trump have supported him, prominent Republicans who are avowedly against U.S. involvement in foreign wars include Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Matt Gaetz.
The strike came just 24 hours after Trump insisted he merited a Nobel Peace Prize—seemingly a long-standing obsession of his.
On June 20 he posted on Truth Social, proclaiming that he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had hammered out a deal to halt the decades-old hostilities between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The White House has been approached for comment.
