Ted Cruz Tells CBS’ Brennan He Had ‘No Indication’ That Iran Was ‘Close To Getting Nuclear Weapons’ — Countering Trump’s Claim

Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) told CBS News host Margaret Brennan Sunday that he did not believe Iran was “anywhere close” to having a nuclear weapon ever since Operation Midnight Hammer targeted the country’s key nuclear facilities last June.

“So, there is no doubt that a year ago, Iran had an active an ongoing nuclear program,” Cruz told Brennan on Sunday’s edition of Face the Nation. “We took out the vast majority of that at the end of the 12-Day War.”

Brennan interjected, “That intelligence assessment was not made public if that it what was briefed to you.”

Cruz continued, “We took out — We launched targeted bombs at the end of the 12-Day War where we dropped the equivalent of about a third of a nuclear weapon on those underground facilities. Facilities like Fordow, built into the base of a mountain. The bunker buster bombs we used, Israel doesn’t have those bombs, no other country has those bombs. We took them out last year.”

Even so, Cruz added, “The Iranians were still hellbent on rebuilding” their nuclear capabilities.

Brennan asked Cruz exactly who was monitoring Iran’s nuclear materials in the absence of Israeli or U.S. boots on the ground.

“Look, the quantity of nuclear material, I didn’t say anything one way or another on that,” Cruz said. “What I said is, they were building nuclear weapons a year ago and our bombing took that out. They also had an ongoing desire to rebuild them.

“I don’t have present-day intelligence on what progress they had made toward rebuilding nuclear weapons since we bombed their facilites,” Cruz continued. ” I have no indication that that they were anywhere close to getting nuclear weapons, because our bombing was devastating…That’s one of the reasons I urged President Trump, ‘Now is the time'” to strike.

President Donald Trump justified the strikes in an eight-minute video posted online early Saturday morning, saying Tehran “can never have a nuclear weapon.”

“We are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally, again, obliterated,” Trump said.

Fox News’s Jacqui Heinrich interviewed Trump Sunday morning, when the president claimed that if the U.S. and Israel hadn’t initiated the missile strikes, Iran “would have had a nuclear weapon within two weeks.”

Watch the clip above via CBS News’s Face The Nation.

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