Fox News host Sean Hannity has recently made Iran’s purported acknowledgement that the country possessed a uranium stockpile it could quickly weaponize into a nuclear bomb the crux of his justification for President Donald Trump’s Iran war.
“We all know what [Trump envoy] Steve Witkoff told the nation, saying they were bragging they had 460 kilograms of 60 percent-enriched uranium, which means it’s weapon-grade 90 percent in a mere seven to 10 days,” he told Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) on Wednesday night. “How is that not an imminent threat?”
But Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had demolished Hannity’s talking point earlier that day when she submitted testimony stating Iran did not have the capability of further enriching its uranium stocks following the U.S. strikes on its nuclear facilities in June.
“As a result of Operation Midnight Hammer, Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated,” Gabbard stated in the written copy of her opening statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee. “There has been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability. The entrances to the underground facilities that were bombed have been buried and shuttered with cement.”
If, as Gabbard stated in that written testimony, Iran lost its uranium enrichment capability in June, and it had not rebuilt it since, then Iran is unable to further enrich its uranium stockpile into weapons-grade material it could use in a nuclear device.
Notably, Gabbard skipped over that portion of her opening statement in reading it to the committee. Confronted on the discrepancy by Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), Gabbard claimed she had done so in the interests of limited time, leading Warner to respond: “You chose to omit the parts that contradict the president.”
Indeed, as Political Information’s Judd Legum noted: “Trump and his proxies have repeatedly justified the war in Iran by claiming that, absent the decision to launch major combat operations, Iran would have had multiple nuclear weapons within weeks. According to the testimony of Trump’s top intelligence official, these claims were false.”
Hannity, however, will not be deterred by the facts. On Wednesday night, he did not address Gabbard’s testimony that Iran lacked the capability to enrich its uranium stocks to weapons-grade — even as he again repeated his talking point that the country could have done so within two weeks.
Hannity is one of the preeminent Trump “proxies” seeking to justify the Iran war on the basis of nuclear capabilities
Hannity’s arguments in favor of the war against Iran have shifted over time to increasingly emphasize the dubious prospect that it could have quickly obtained a nuclear bomb absent the attack by U.S. and Israeli forces.
The Fox star and Trump operative had claimed following the June strikes that “the U.S. military completely obliterated Iran's nuclear program” and that its “nuclear ambitions” were “officially dead.”
While beating the drums for renewed attacks in February, he justified strikes on the grounds that Iran’s leaders refused to “give up their nuclear program,” but he did not suggest they could quickly develop a nuclear bomb. Instead, in scrambling for justifications for war both before and after the strikes began, Hannity and his allies focused on the evils of the Iranian regime, which they suggested could be quickly removed without substantial American cost.
But that case quickly withered after Israel’s assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the war’s first day did not trigger regime change and Iran took the obvious step of closing the Strait of Hormuz in response to the attack. And so Hannity began emphasizing a different argument to justify the enhanced cost of the operation — that Iran’s nuclear program posed an imminent threat, which he adopted from Witkoff.
Witkoff negotiated on behalf of the U.S. alongside the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner in talks with Iranian counterparties in the lead-up to the war. Neither Witkoff nor Kushner has prior experience in nuclear diplomacy, though both have sizable business interests in the Gulf region, and the talks failed.
The presidential envoy, in a March 2 interview with Hannity, argued that Iran’s disclosure of its nuclear materials during those talks justified the war. Stating that Iran’s negotiators had said they possessed “roughly 460 kilograms of 60 percent-enriched uranium,” which he said “can be brought to 90 percent, that's weapon-grade -- weapons-grade, in roughly one week, maybe 10 days at the outside.”
“Both the Iranian negotiators said to us directly with, you know, no shame, that they controlled 460 kilograms of 60 percent and they're aware that that could make 11 nuclear bombs and that was the beginning of their negotiating stance,” Witkoff added. “They were proud that they had evaded all sorts of oversight protocols to get to a place where they could deliver 11 nuclear bombs.”