CNN Reports Trump Stopped ‘High Risk’ Ground Mission to Get Iran’s Uranium

CNN national security correspondent Natasha Bertrand joined anchor Kasie Hunt on Friday to detail her latest scoop related to the war in Iran, a report on President Donald Trump shutting down a Pentagon plan at the last minute to put troops into Iran.

“Natasha, you and Zach Cohen, our colleague, have some new exclusive reporting on a way that this war might have unfolded but didn’t, reporting on the plan to send ground troops into Iran that was ultimately paused. I mean, what have you learned?” Hunt began.

“Yeah, Kasie. So this operation actually came much closer to being greenlit than I think was previously understood. And one anecdote that kind of underscores that is the fact that General Dan Cain, who was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he rushed back from Europe, where he was attending a very high-level NATO meeting, to Tampa, to U.S. Central Command headquarters, on extremely short notice in order to be briefed in person on these plans that had been developed for the U.S. Military to go in and to seize — forcibly — that highly enriched uranium that has been so critical to the Trump administration’s objectives here, because that is the material, of course, that you need to produce a nuclear weapon,” Bertrand began, adding:

And so prior to this deal kind of coming together, and we’ll see, of course, whether it’s actually finalized, the U.S. Military was seriously considering and about to move forward with this plan for potentially hundreds, if not thousands, of U.S. troops to essentially invade Iran, go to these nuclear sites, find this nuclear material, which is buried deep underground across several sites inside Iran at the nuclear facilities, and extract it, trying not to incur too many casualties. But of course that was the main problem — we are told that President Trump saw with this entire operation — is that it would likely cause a high number of American troops to be killed or wounded. On top of that, it would likely prolong the war, given Iran’s likelihood of retaliation, plunging the global economy further into turmoil.

And these are all just risks that the president wasn’t willing to take at that point. So while this is very much a plan that is in the books and is still very much on the table if things do fall apart, it is also extremely risky and, of course, extremely high stakes. And it’s something that the president wasn’t sure that the American people would ultimately support. And now, of course, we find ourselves here.

Watch the clip above via CNN.

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