The Clinton campaign said Hillary Clinton agrees with vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine’s controversial statement Tuesday that the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement eliminated Iran’s nuclear program.
During the vice-presidential debate, Kaine said repeatedly that Iran’s nuclear program “has been stopped” and that Clinton had “worked a tough negotiation with nations … to eliminate the Iranian nuclear weapons program.”
Fact checkers rated Kaine’s claim false almost immediately, writing that the nuclear deal only purports to curb, not eliminate, Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and that the country still has a nuclear infrastructure.
But the Clinton campaign reaffirmed Kaine’s statements after the debate, with campaign spokesman Brian Fallon telling Fox News’s Megyn Kelly that Hillary Clinton also believed that Iran’s nuclear program has been eliminated.
“You believe the Iranian nuclear program has stopped? That’s her position and your position?” Kelly said.
“Yes,” Fallon responded.
He added that the Iranians still “harbor ambitions to pursue nuclear weapons,” but that “their capability to pursue that nuclear program is completely off now.”
When Kelly said that Kaine’s claims were “factually wrong,” Fallon disagreed.
The Clinton campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
President Obama has said that after fifteen years, the length of time allotted for most of the deal’s restrictions, Iran will be able to develop material for a nuclear weapon in “a matter of months.”
Experts have noted that these restrictions are short-term and reversible, and that Iran will “likely have an industrial-sized and widely dispersed nuclear program” in fifteen years.
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency reported in July that Iran had been attempting to obtain illegal nuclear technology at a “high level” throughout 2015.
