When Donald Trump declared earlier this week that U.S. military strikes had “completely and totally obliterated” and “completely destroyed” Iranian nuclear sites, the president’s rhetoric was difficult to take seriously for the most obvious of reasons: He made the boasts long before he knew whether they were true or not.

It was soon after when the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency completed a preliminary intelligence assessment and found the airstrikes were less effective than Trump claimed and that the mission set Iran’s nuclear program back by only months, not decades.

In the days that followed, there have been a variety of related assessments — the CIA said the strikes “severely damaged” Iran’s nuclear program, and Iran’s foreign minister used similar phrasing — even as the White House has clung to its “obliterated” line.

It was against this backdrop that the administration arranged a closed-door briefing for the entirety of the U.S. Senate, presumably to help set the record straight on what federal officials know. From Team Trump’s perspective, this was not exactly a breakthrough success. NBC News reported:

Coming out of a classified briefing with top Cabinet officials, Sen. Chris Murphy said it ‘still appears that we have only set back the Iranian nuclear program by a handful of months.’ … ‘There’s no doubt there was damage done to the program, but the allegations that we have obliterated their program just don’t seem to stand up for reason,’ Murphy, D-Conn., told reporters on Capitol Hill.

As for Trump’s word of the week, the Connecticut Democrat added, “I just do not think the president was telling the truth when he said this program was obliterated. … I walk away from that briefing still under the belief that we have not obliterated the programs. The president was deliberately misleading the public when he said the program was obliterated.”

Around the same time, his fellow Connecticut Democrat, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, after receiving the same briefing, told reporters, “I think ‘obliterated’ is much too strong.”

Soon after, on the chamber’s floor, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said, “A few days ago, President Trump claimed that Iran’s nuclear program was ‘totally and completely obliterated.’ I asked what information exists to verify the president’s claims, and I did not receive an answer to that question.”

Even Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who usually goes out of his way to align himself with the White House, said after the briefing that the security threat posed by Iran is “not over” and that the country will “keep trying” to develop a nuclear weapons program, which is largely the opposite of what Trump has argued this week.

He wasn’t alone: Politico reported, “A number of Senate Republicans exited an afternoon briefing on U.S. airstrikes in Iran not quite ready to endorse President Donald Trump’s claim that Tehran’s nuclear program was ‘obliterated.’”

If the goal of Thursday’s briefing was to get everyone on the same page, it clearly did not serve its intended purpose.