The killing of al-Sharif and his colleagues is “really murder,” says Irene Khan, U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression. “It is not killing in the context of war. It is a deliberate strategy to stop independent voices reporting.”
Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs on over 1,500 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream at democracynow.org Mondays to Fridays 8-9 a.m. ET. Subscribe to our Daily Email Digest: https://democracynow.org/subscribe
At The Hague, a city in the Netherlands, today for a summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Trump showed that he cannot let go of the intelligence assessment that his military strikes against Iran had set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions only by a few months. He appears determined to convince Americans that he has solved the problem of Iran’s nuclear ambitions overnight.
“It’s gone for years, years,” he said. And then, turning to the news outlets that reported the early conclusions of Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the intelligence arm of the Pentagon, that the hits delayed production of a nuclear weapon by only a few months, he said: “CNN is scum. MSDNC is scum. The New York Times is scum. They’re bad people. They’re sick. And what they’ve done is they’ve tried to make this unbelievable victory into something less.” Trump insisted that the U.S. hits caused “total obliteration.” He claimed he did not want the recognition of the effectiveness of the hits for himself, but rather for “the military.”
Trump equated the strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities with the U.S. bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters at the NATO summit that the FBI had launched a criminal investigation into who had leaked the DIA report, complaining that “CNN and others are trying to spin it to make the president look bad, when this was an overwhelming success.” Later in the morning, Trump’s social media account posted that CNN should fire Natasha Bertrand, one of the CNN journalists who broke the story that the attacks had done less damage than Trump claimed.
Marc Caputo of Axios reported this afternoon that the Trump administration will limit the classified information it shares with Congress after the leak of the DIA assessment, even though there is currently no evidence tying that leak to Congress. A senior White House official said: “We are declaring a war on leakers.”
Stephan Neukam and Andrew Solender of Axios reported that congressional Democrats, already angry that the administration delayed briefing Congress about the strikes on Iran past the legal deadline for such a briefing, see the announcement that the White House will limit the information it provides to Congress as an attempt to hide reality in order to bolster Trump’s narrative. “A senior House Democrat told the Axios reporters: “[T]his from a group of people who used Signal about actual war plans?”
On the Senate floor, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said: “The administration has no right to stonewall Congress on matters of national security. Senators deserve information, and the administration has a legal obligation to inform Congress precisely about what is happening right now abroad.”
Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said: “The law requires the congressional intelligence committees to be kept fully and currently informed, and I expect the Intelligence Community to comply with the law.”
Tomorrow the White House will brief senators on the strikes. Notably, it is not sending Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who testified in March that the Intelligence Community did not think Iran was developing a nuclear weapon. Instead, it is sending Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine. Ratcliffe, not Gabbard, will represent the Intelligence Community.
Today, Ratcliffe appeared to walk back Trump’s claims that the strikes had “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, saying instead they had “severely damaged” the program.
On his social media platform tonight, Trump continued his attacks on CNN and announced that tomorrow morning, Hegseth and “Military Representatives” will hold a “Major News Conference” to “fight for the Dignity of our Great American Pilots.” He claimed those “Patriots” were “very upset!” when they “started reading Fake News by CNN and The Failing New York Times. They felt terribly!… The News Conference will prove both interesting and irrefutable. Enjoy!”
There is no evidence that anyone sees the correction of Trump’s extreme claims as an attack on the pilots who flew the mission, or that the pilots see that correction in that way.
Laura Rozen of Diplomatic notes that the strikes might have convinced Iran to abandon negotiations and commit to building a nuclear weapon. Rozen quotes former top European Union Iran nuclear negotiator Enrique Mora, who wrote: “This unprecedented strike has shown, for the second time, the Islamic regime that nuclear diplomacy is reversible, fragile and vulnerable to changes in leadership in Washington. There will not be a third time.” Mora continued: “If Iran now decides to move towards a bomb, it will do so following a clear strategic logic. No one bombs the capital of a nuclear-armed country. June 21, 2025 may go down in history not as the day the Iranian nuclear program was destroyed, but as the day a nuclear Iran was irreversibly born.”
Tonight, on his social media site, Trump’s account called for Israel to abandon its trial of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, calling it a “ridiculous Witch Hunt.” Trump claimed that Netanyahu was a partner in “something that nobody thought was possible, a complete elimination of potentially one of the biggest and most powerful Nuclear Weapons anywhere in the world, and it was going to happen, SOON!” Trump called for the trial to be “CANCELLED, IMMEDIATELY, or a Pardon given to a Great Hero.” He continued: “It was the United States of America that saved Israel, and now it is going to be the United States of America that saves Bibi Netanyahu.”
He may not be in office, but Donald Trump has been speaking with the powers that be about Israel’s war on Gaza—but it’s not in an effort to end the genocide.
Instead, Trump has allegedly been talking with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to avert a cease-fire deal, fearing that doing so could help Vice President Kamala Harris win in November, according to PBS.
“The reporting is that former President Trump is on the phone with the Prime Minister of Israel, urging him not to cut a deal right now, because it’s believed that would help the Harris campaign,” said PBS’s Judy Woodruff Monday night. “So, I don’t know where—who knows whether that will come about or not, but I have to think that the Harris campaign would like for President Biden to do what presidents do, and that’s to work on that one.”
It wasn’t immediately clear if Woodruff was referring to a new report, or an Axios story last week that cited two U.S. sources as claiming that Trump and Netanyahu had spoken on the phone about cease-fire and Gaza hostage talks. Netanyahu’s office and Trump both separately denied the report.
“I did encourage him to get this over with. You want to get it over with fast. Have victory, get your victory, and get it over with. It has to stop, the killing has to stop,” Trump said at a New Jersey press conference on Thursday, referring to their meeting at Mar-a-Lago last month. But he also criticized cease-fire demands.
During Biden’s speech at the Democratic National Convention on Monday, the president promised that his administration is working around the clock to bring “humanitarian assistance into Gaza,” “peace and security to the Middle East,” and to deliver a “cease-fire” and an end to the war.
The president also nodded to the more than 3,500 protesters who took to the streets of Chicago on Monday, demanding an immediate cease-fire to the war, claiming that the demonstrators “have a point.”* The war has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians since it began 10 months ago.
Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who escaped the besieged country in December, reported on Monday that the humanitarian area in south Gaza is little more than 14 square miles.
“Crammed in it are more than 1.8 million people, with no water, no electricity, no food, no clinics or pharmacies, and no shelters,” he wrote, lamenting in a separate post that he cannot “understand how this government continues to fund the genocide but cannot put an end to it” and “force the aggressors to stop dropping bombs.”
