It was just a few months ago when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told members of Congress — under oath, while reading from a prepared text — that the U.S. intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme leader Khomeini has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”

As NBC News reported last week, “The U.S. assessment of Iran’s nuclear program has not changed since March.” That might not have been what the White House wanted the public to hear, but it’s what U.S. intelligence agencies kept telling policymakers.

For his part, Donald Trump twice last week said he didn’t care about the conclusions drawn by his own country’s intelligence community, which set the stage for the preemptive military strikes the president approved on Iranian nuclear targets over the weekend.

The day after the strikes, JD Vance appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and host Kristin Welker asked, “Do you and President Trump trust the U.S. intelligence community and its assessment?” The vice president replied, “Of course we trust our intelligence community, but we also trust our instincts.”

It was a difficult answer to take seriously: Neither Trump nor Vance are in a position to have an instinctive understanding of a foreign country’s nuclear program. There is no definition of “instinct” in which that makes sense.

Around the same time, however, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had an even more unfortunate answer to a related question. HuffPost reported:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio refused to say on Sunday whether the United States actually had intelligence that Iran was building a weapon of mass destruction before bombing the Gulf country’s nuclear sites ― dismissing any such assessment as “irrelevant” to the Saturday night attack that will very likely lead to wider conflict.

On “Face the Nation,” CBS News’ Margaret Brennan focused specific attention on Rubio’s use of the phrase “weaponization ambitions,” which is a far cry from Iran actually developing nuclear weapons. “Are you saying there that the United States did not see intelligence that the supreme leader had ordered weaponization?” the host asked.

“That’s irrelevant,” Rubio said.

When Brennan reminded the Florida Republican that this detail has been at the heart of U.S. intelligence assessments, the secretary of state appeared unimpressed.

“Forget about intelligence,” Rubio said after a tense back-and-forth. “What the [International Atomic Energy Agency] knows is they are enriching uranium well beyond anything you need for a civil nuclear program. So why would you enrich uranium at 60% if you don’t intend to one day use it to take it to 90% and build a weapon? Why are you developing [intercontinental ballistic missiles]?”

But that answer misses the point of the question. If Rubio wanted to argue that Iran had a dangerous program, few would dispute the point. If Rubio wanted to argue that it was necessary to deal with this burgeoning problem, that too would be uncontroversial.

The underlying point, however, was about the possible disconnect between the U.S. intelligence and the decision to launch another preemptive military strike in the Middle East — and “forget about intelligence” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Indeed, the foundational question behind the mission — why did the administration take such a step — remains unresolved. If the best officials can muster is “we also trust our instincts,” then it becomes easier to suspect that there was no actual intelligence to justify the move.