White House spokesman Josh Earnest late Thursday took “significant exception” to elements of a think tank report saying the Obama administration and other western powers provided “secret exceptions” in the nuclear deal allow Iran to meet an implementation deadline.
“You won’t be surprised to hear me say that we obviously take significant exception to some of the details that are included in the report,” Earnest told reporters traveling with President Obama to Midway Atoll for the designation of the largest marine monument in the world.
Earnest said the U.S and its western allies negotiating the deal with Tehran never set a concrete implementation deadline in the July nuclear agreement.
“The implementation deadline was not codified in that July agreement,” Earnest said. The timing was instead “driven by the ability of the [International Atomic Energy Agency] to verify that Iran had completed the steps that they promised to take.”
“The steps they promised to take were very clearly laid out and there were independent, international experts who were given unprecedented access to Iran’s nuclear facilities to verify that they had lived up to their commitments,” he continued.
He said the report by the independent Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security was misinformation and more sour grapes from critics.
Before the agreement went into effect, critics said Iran would never go along with the deal, then shifted to saying Iran would never live up to the commitments that they made, he said.
“They are wrong about that. The IAEA has been able to verify their compliance with the agreement,” he said.
“So the truth is, time and time again, our critics have tried to tear down this agreement, but the facts are simply not on their side when they make this argument,” he concluded. “And the report that we’ve seen and the rhetoric that it has prompted is entirely consistent with the failure of critics of the deal to tear it down.”
Earlier in the day, the White House seemed to focus its attention on the report’s claim that the exemptions from key aspects of the nuclear agreement were “secret.”
A White House official acknowledged that a Joint Commission in charge of overseeing the nuclear deal’s implementation met regularly to “consult and provide guidance.”
“This is not secret — the Joint Commission and its role in addressing implementation, have been publicly announced and reported, and the administration has briefed Congress frequently and comprehensively on all of the Joint Commission’s work,” the official told the Washington Examiner in an emailed statement.
Reuters reported the Institute’s findings and said they were based on information provided by several anonymous officials of governments involved in the negotiations. The group’s president, David Albright, is a former U.N. weapons inspector and co-author of the report.
The exemptions, the report states, included two that allowed Iran to exceed limits laid out in the nuclear agreement on how much low-enriched uranium it can maintain in its nuclear facilities. A joint commission created to oversee the deal’s implementation approved the exemptions.
