NYT’s Crowley: Trump Has Taken a Victory Lap on Very Little Evidence

EXCERPT:

CROWLEY: "This is a really important point. You know, as is typical of President Trump, he’s taken a victory lap based on very little evidence and, you know, he likes to say that whatever he’s done has been an unqualified success. The truth is often more complicated and there’s not really a satisfying answer right now. It takes time to assess what is happening in a country that’s close to — largely close to foreigners, and this is a program that, you know, large amounts of it are underground at Fordo, it’s deep under a mountain, so we have satellite photos showing essentially holes in the. top of the mountain, but we don’t know for sure what happened inside. You know, it seems quite likely that they’re — almost certain that there really has been extensive damage to this program, but has there been so much that the Iranians could not crash and try to sprint to a bomb with nuclear material that remains? And it does appear that there is a substantial amount of material remaining in the country that is enriched to levels that are not too far from what would be required to make a bomb. Is it clear that they don’t -- that they would not be able to do that in less time than we would be comfortable with? That’s not clear. So this declaration of total unqualified victory I think is very premature, but it is going to take some more time to figure out exactly what the state of the program is.”