After Leak, Administration to Tell Congress Less

Unhappy with the leak of a preliminary assessment of the damage done to Iran's nuclear facilities in a US bombing that disagrees with his own, President Trump plans to restrict the classified information his administration shares with Congress. "We are declaring a war on leakers," a senior White House official told Axios on Wednesday. Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio, national security adviser in addition to being secretary of state, angrily objected to the leaking of the Defense Intelligence Agency's initial assessment, which they say was meant to counter the president's claim that the targets had been "obliterated."

At the NATO summit in the Netherlands, Hegseth told reporters that the leak is being investigated, per the Hill. The FBI has launched its own investigation. And Rubio is arguing that "obliterated" is more accurate than "damaged." The official said intelligence agencies are looking to change their processes to prevent the release of analyses "that have 'low confidence' to the media." In the future, administration officials said, less will be posted on CAPNET, the system used to share classified information with Congress. Democrats in Congress already have complained that they weren't informed before the attack.