Check 1 — Verbatim Priority: The verbatim quote ('Central Command says American forces, quote, blew up six small Iranian boats in the strait') is assessed as the operative text. It is structurally an attribution claim — Cooper is relaying what CENTCOM stated, not asserting independent knowledge of the military event. Check 2 — Extraction Fidelity: The claim_text accurately paraphrases the verbatim; no extraction-introduced language requiring correction. Check 3 — Wrong-Cited-Fact Gate: The figure of six boats is confirmed by the primary institutional record (CENTCOM official transcript, centcom.mil ); no wrong-cited-fact issue arises. The claim's truth predicate is narrow and dual-layered: (a) did CENTCOM make this statement, and (b) did Anderson Cooper accurately relay it? Both are affirmatively established. Admiral Cooper stated during a media conference call on May 4, 2026 that US forces 'eliminate[d] six Iranian small boats threatening commercial shipping,' and CNN's own live-blog simultaneously reported this using the phrase 'blew up six small Iranian boats,' matching Cooper's verbatim relay almost word for word . The official CENTCOM transcript on centcom.mil provides a Tier 1 primary institutional record confirming the statement was made , with multiple independent Tier 3-4 outlets across different institutional origins confirming the same six-boat figure and the 'blew up' characterization . Trump's subsequent reference to 'seven' boats is a discrepancy in a separate speaker's account that does not affect the accuracy of Cooper's relay of the CENTCOM admiral's specific figure. Iran's denial of the underlying military event is noted but does not bear on whether CENTCOM made the statement — which is the entirety of what the attribution claim asserts. The domain constraint (active military operations; battle damage assessment is single-origin) caps source_strength at MEDIUM per protocol but does not affect the ATTRIBUTION verdict, because the claim is not asserting that six boats were in fact destroyed — only that CENTCOM said so. For that narrower proposition, source strength is effectively HIGH given the Tier 1 primary record and multiple independent Tier 3-4 corroborators. Minimum source requirements for TRUE are met (Tier 1 source plus multiple independent Tier 4 sources; INDEPENDENT source_independence for the attribution predicate).