Jeremy Scahill

They just want to make a deal.

But the fact is that the Iranians are not doing that.

And I think that what the American public, because there was such propaganda about the extent of the destruction that was done to Iran.

You had this report in The Washington Post yesterday that actually the Iranians retain a huge percentage.

They said 70 percent, 75 percent of both ballistic missiles and drones.

The American public was led to believe that Iran was basically finished and that it was collapsing.

And in fact, the Iranian foreign minister in a post on X this morning, Abbas Arachi, said that the CIA assessments as published in The Washington Post are actually incorrect.

Our capacity is more like 120 percent of of our ballistic missiles because they're saying they've been rebuilding them.

I think they're telling the truth.

You know, I think the Iranians have a far more sophisticated manufacturing operation for their ballistic missiles and drones.

They also recently got dual use technology imported from China.

The United States is aware that those shipments happened.

And I think that at the end of the day, one of the scandals of this is that the U.S.

has consistently misled, if not outright lied about the extent of damage.

And that's why Trump keeps saying, oh, they want to make a deal.

The Iranians still feel that they have leverage and they think that Trump backed off in the Strait of Hormuz because he was stuck and because he has a visit coming up with Xi Jinping in China.

He wants some kind of a flimsy memorandum of understanding.

And Trump wants the Iranians to preemptively say things about their nuclear program that as of this moment, when I'm talking to you, the Iranians are saying they are not going to negotiate on the front end of a memorandum of understanding about issues that took three years to negotiate under Barack Obama when the 2015 deal

You know, I mean, it's a good question, Emily.

And what I've been told up to this moment is that it's possible that the Iranians are going to make some broader general statement about nuclear that could be contained in this MOU.