Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Tuesday that the intelligence community maintains its assessment from prior years that Iran is not currently actively pursuing a nuclear weapon, but that open discussion of nuclearization has increased inside the regime.
“The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamanei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003,” Gabbard said in her opening remarks at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.
But, Gabbard added, “In the past year, we have seen an erosion of a decades-long taboo in Iran on discussing nuclear weapons in public, likely emboldening nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision-making apparatus. Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”
Gabbard also said that the full impacts of renewed sanctions on Iran are not yet in effect, but that the “message … is certainly heard.”
The intelligence community’s
annual threat assessment, released in conjunction with the hearing, predicts that Iran will continue efforts to threaten U.S. citizens globally and develop networks and conduct operations inside the United States.
It also describes Iran’s military capabilities and proxy armies as an ongoing threat to the U.S. and its allies, despite Israeli successes in degrading those capabilities.
“The IC assesses Iran’s prospects for reconstituting force losses and posing a credible deterrent, particularly to Israeli actions, are dim in the near-term,” the report continues.
The report suggests that Iranian political and economic struggles could be fodder for renewed domestic political unrest and protest inside Iran, unless Iran is granted sanctions relief.
The intelligence community also assessed that Hamas is a continued threat to Israeli security and is “capable of resuming a low-level guerilla resistance and to remain the dominant political action in Gaza for the foreseeable future.” It notes that Hamas’ popularity in Gaza has decreased but it remains popular in the West Bank.
The report warns that resumed conflict between Israel and Hezbollah would “threaten Lebanon’s fragile stability” and could prompt a range of negative outcomes inside Lebanon.
It also states that Syria could again devolve into violence, and that even if the new government is able to form a durable coalition across the various ethnic and sectarian groups, “governing Syria will remain a daunting challenge amid the country’s economic problems, humanitarian needs driven in part by millions of internally displaced Syrians, rampant insecurity, as well as ethnic, sectarian, and religious cleavages.”
Protesters affiliated with the far-left group Code Pink disrupted the hearing to advocate against U.S. support for Israel. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), the committee chair, citing
reports of Chinese funding to the group, said that its activism against Israel reflects the coordination among U.S. adversaries.
In a series of heated exchanges, Democratic lawmakers repeatedly pressed the intelligence community leaders about the recent revelation that U.S. officials had discussed plans for U.S. strikes on the Houthis in Yemen on a commercial messaging app in a group chat that inadvertently included a reporter.
Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who were members of the chat, provided a series of largely evasive and sometimes inconsistent responses on the situation. They at points denied that classified information had been shared in the chat, while at other times said they did not recall details of what had been discussed and suggested that only Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth could say whether the information involved had been classified.
Multiple Republican senators indicated they also had concerns about the revelations, but planned to question the officials about them in a subsequent classified session.
The threat assessment report released Tuesday did not include a section on the threats from transnational racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists — a category that includes violent white supremacists — which intelligence officials in the previous administration had characterized as a major threat.
