OAN Staff Blake Wolf
12:20 PM – Thursday, June 19, 2025
All 100 U.S. senators are set to receive a classified briefing on the Israel-Iran war early next week, according to an aide to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
“We’ve gotten briefings and I have requested that we get an all-senators classified briefing,” Schumer (D-N.Y.) stated prior to reportedly having his request approved by the Trump administration.
Senator Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) made a Thursday appearance on Fox News with host Harris Faulkner, explaining the upcoming bipartisan meeting.
“I think it’s important to point out Harris that things are changing on the ground all the time, Israel has made incredible progress, I mean if you think about – just say three years ago the threats that they were facing through Iran’s proxies, whether it’s Hamas, Hezbollah, all of them have been wiped out. They effectively control the skies now in Iran,” he stated.
“I think there’s a lot of opportunities moving ahead, but I trust President Trump on this. He is getting all the information in real time, he’s in full command of his office, and he sort of re-oriented America’s foreign policy. He’s been very clear Iran should not have a nuclear weapon and he’s also been clear he’s not for forever wars and that kind of thing that we saw for thirty years with American foreign policy just sort of wandering without any real intention,” Schmitt continued.
Schmitt’s comments come as the United States is weighing in on whether or not to get involved in the Israel-Iran war, with Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announcing the president will make a decision “within the next two weeks.”
Leavitt delivered a message directly from President Donald Trump during Thursday’s press briefing.
“Based on the fact that there’s a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks.”
The war broke out last Thursday after Israel launched “preemptive” strikes targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities, top Iranian generals and Iranian nuclear scientists in an attempt to neuter the nations nuclear program to prevent the regime from developing a nuclear weapon.
Despite the concern for Iran developing nuclear weapons, U.S. intelligence, along with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an intergovernmental nuclear energy and atomic weapon watchdog, argued that there is currently no knowledge of Iran actively developing a nuclear weapon since 2003. However, the same watchdog also announced that for the first time in 20 years, Iran had breached its non-proliferation obligations and was not working with its inspectors.
In an interview this week, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi stated: “If there was some activity which was clandestine or hidden or away from our inspectors, we couldn’t know,” Grossi stated.
Grossi went on to state that the IAEA has reported that “we did not have — as in coincidence with some of the sources you mentioned there — that we did not have any proof of a systematic effort to move into a nuclear weapon.”
Grossi’s comments are seemingly in alignment with U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s testimonial before the Senate Intelligence Committee in March stating that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and [Iranian] Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”
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