CNN's Natasha Bertrand Lied about the Russian Hoax and Hunter Biden's Laptop

Now She Cherry Picks and Lies About The Damage To Iran’s Nuclear Program

By Chuck Warren

CNN reported earlier today that the U.S. attack on three nuclear sites in Iran—Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan—set back the program for only months, according to a preliminary assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The White House is disputing it. Keep a few things in mind.

First, the reporter is disreputable. Natasha Bertrand is the same person who reported for Politico, “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” in 2020. Don’t believe what she says.

Her career breakthrough was pushing the Alfa Bank and Russia hoax story, writing that the FBI was “examining how money may have moved from the Kremlin to covertly help Trump win.” From there, she became famous and moved from Business Insider to Politico.

In 2018, she went on the Chris Hayes’s show on MSNBC to talk about Trump’s connections with Russia and said, “I mean, what more evidence do you need? It’s very, very obvious.”

After becoming a celebrity journalist thanks to the Russia hoax, she made the news by reporting that Trump was pocketing money by making the Air National Guard personnel lodge at one of his hotels in Scotland. She wrote, “the military has helped keep Trump’s Turnberry resort afloat — the property lost $4.5 million in 2017, but revenue went up $3 million in 2018.” Upon further reporting, it turned out that the resort had been a frequent layover for the military because it was a cheap hotel, and the money that went into Trump’s pocket was too small for a rich guy to care about.

More recently, she made headlines by reporting that Israel was not using precision-guided munitions in Gaza, and wrote, “experts told CNN that if Israel is using unguided munitions at the rate the US believes they are, that undercuts the Israeli claim that they are trying to minimize civilian casualties.” Her story omitted that there is a global shortage of precision-guided munitions, and that Israel had to husband the more advanced munitions it had for war with Iran. Instead, it implied that Israel was intentionally killing innocent Palestinians. So that nobody would miss the point that she is a celebrity and not a real journalist, she won an Emmy for her report.

Her report on the damage done to Iran’s nuclear program is a new low. It is one thing to be a hack partisan and propagandist and attack a president of the opposite party, as inappropriate as it is for a journalist. False reporting about a U.S. partner in a defensive war to make it look bad is also inappropriate, but you could blame it on the fact that she is stupid and unfamiliar with military matters despite being a national security reporter. But it is unpatriotic to cherry-pick and misreport a battle assessment to make the U.S. military look ineffective and imply that the enemy has won. This is what she just did. I thought that politics stops at the water’s edge, but apparently it doesn’t.

She wrote:

The US military strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities last weekend did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months, according to an early US intelligence assessment that was described by four people briefed on it.

First of all, she has not seen the report herself. Second, she does not mention that the assessment is marked “low confidence,” which in the intelligence bureaucracy is jokingly dubbed as “we have no effing idea what’s going on.”

Further reporting by serious journalists has also clarified that this is only about the Fordow site and not all three targets.

What else matters is that Israel has killed all the scientists and destroyed Iran’s scientific archives—the funny thing is that Israel stole Iran’s nuclear archives a few years back, so if the Iranians want to get back to where they were they kind of need to ask the Mossad for a copy of their own research! So Iran is left with its junior scientists without any progress report papers. Most of the scientific learning of the past 20 years has been destroyed.

She quotes a source that “the (DIA) assessment is that the U.S. set them back maybe a few months, tops.” But this is entirely based on satellite imagery and “signal intelligence,” but it is not disclosed whether the signal intelligence is just an analysis of the signals coming out of the facility, like heat and electricity, or also interception of communications. The first one is less reliable because it does not tell you about what has been damaged inside. The second one includes Iran’s on-the-ground assessment of the situation, which we have eavesdropped on, but it is unlikely that the Iranians themselves know the damage just a few days after the attack. This is especially important because Fox News’s Jennifer Griffin reported that the entrances are caved in, so Iranians themselves can’t enter.

Most importantly, even if the assessment is correct, it is only for one site. It takes more than uranium enrichment to create a weapon. The United States and Israel have also either destroyed or significantly damaged the Arak heavy water reactor (a core component for a nuclear program), by some estimates close to 20,000 centrifuges, which Iran needs to enrich its uranium to weapons grade, and the missile program, which you need to carry a weapon. Considering all these, even if the report is accurate, Iran was weeks away from having a nuclear explosive and a year away from having a fully functional nuclear weapon—that is, a warhead attached to a missile. Today, it’s years away.

But the report is probably inaccurate anyway. Or maybe it is accurate. The point is that nobody knows, and nobody will know for weeks, if not months. It is too soon to tell.

What is already established is that Natasha Bertrand is a partisan hack who today proved to also be unpatriotic.

CNN should fire her now. She deserves no benefit of the doubt.

Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Chuck Warren only and not his co-host Sam Stone or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.