This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
President Donald Trump on Sunday said whoever leaked an initial, low-confidence Defense Intelligence Agency report on the success of U.S. military strikes on Iran's nuclear sites "should be prosecuted," and floated the notion of journalists revealing the perpetrator.
Appearing on "Sunday Morning Futures" on the Fox News Channel, Trump told anchor Maria Bartiromo: "They should be prosecuted."
"Who specifically?" asked Bartiromo.
"The people that leaked it," replied Trump.
"We can find out. If they want to, they could find out easily. You go up and tell the reporter, 'National security, who gave it [to you]?'
"You have to do that, and I suspect we'll be doing things like that," Trump continued.
As WorldNetDaily reported last week, Trump said the U.S. pilots who bombed three nuclear sites in Iran Saturday were "devastated" by negative news reports in American media minimizing the damage inflicted on the Islamic Republic's nuclear weapons development.
Speaking to reporters Wednesday at the NATO Summit in the Netherlands, Trump said: "I got a call that the pilots and the people on the plane were devastated because they (the media) were trying to minimize the attack. And they all said it was hit."
"They were devastated. They put their lives on the line and they have … real scum come out and write reports that are as negative as they could possibly be. It should be the opposite. You should make them heroes and heroines.
"There were so devastated when they heard this news. And you know what they said? I spoke to one of them. He said, 'Sir, we hit the site. It was perfect, it was dead-on!'
"Because they don't understand fake news because they have a normal life, except they have to fly very big, very fast planes. But it's a shame. You should be making them heroes."
At another press availability earlier in the day, Trump said: "This was an unbelievable hit by genius pilots and genius people in the military, and they're not being given credit for it because we have scum … CNN is scum. MSDNC is scum. The New York Times is scum. They're bad people. They're sick.
"What they've done is, they're trying to make this unbelievable victory into something less. Now even they admit that it was hit very hard. But it wasn't hit hard. It was hit brutally, and it knocked it out."
Appearing with Trump at The Hague was U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who stressed Iran's nuclear weapons program is indeed "obliterated."
"Those that dropped the bombs precisely in the right place know exactly what happened when that exploded," Hegseth said.
"And you know who else knows? Iran. That's why they came to the table right away because their nuclear capabilities have been set back beyond what they thought were possible because of the courage of a commander in chief who led our troops despite what the fake news wants to say."
He continued: "The skill and the courage it took to go into enemy territory flying 36 hours on behalf of the American people and the world to take out a nuclear program is beyond what anyone in this audience can fathom.
"And then the intact, the instinct of CNN, the instinct of the New York Times is to try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons to try to hurt President Trump or our country. They don't care what the troops think. They don't care what the world thinks. They want to spin it to try to make him look bad based on a leak."
"What do leakers do? They have agendas. And what do they do? Do they share the whole information or just the part that they want to introduce."
"Why is there low confidence [in the damage assessment]? Because all of the evidence of what was just bombed by twelve 30,000-pound bombs is buried under a mountain, devastated and obliterated. So if you want to make an assessment of what happened at Fordow, you better get a big shovel and go really deep, because Iran's nuclear program is obliterated."
As WorldNetDaily reported Tuesday, CNN reported that three sources indicated the U.S. attack Saturday "did not destroy the core components of the country's nuclear program and likely only set it back a few months."
The network claims the information was based on a bombing assessment report done by the Defense Intelligence Agency after the strikes.
