Top Republicans are raising concerns about the Biden administration’s plans to revive the Iran nuclear deal, asserting that the president should receive congressional approval before reentering an agreement.
Calls for President Joe Biden to reconsider his plans to get back into a deal similar to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which would place a limit on Iran’s nuclear activity in exchange for a rollback of international sanctions, came as negotiators reportedly close in on an agreement. It could be finalized within days.
“Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine is reprehensible, but we can’t lose sight of the next national security crisis as it forms before our eyes,” House Foreign Affairs ranking member Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, said in a statement.
“The Biden administration is reportedly rushing to finalize a deal with Iran, brokered by Russia, that it does not want Congress to review, in violation of U.S. law,” he said. “Congressional review of any Iran nuclear deal was enacted with broad bipartisan support to ensure legislative oversight of any dealings regarding the nuclear program of the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. If the administration circumvents Congress, that is a blinking red light for the American people that this is a bad deal.”
IRAN’S LEADER ACCUSES US WEAPONS ‘MAFIA’ OF MANUFACTURING UKRAINE WAR
Rep. Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican who also sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he believes the administration is acting without congressional approval because the pact does not have the support to pass.
“The JCPOA was, in its purest form, among other things … designed to go around Congress. It has all the tenets of a treaty, even though President Obama didn’t want to treat it as such, and the reason he didn’t want to treat it as such is that it could have never passed in the Congress as a treaty. This is nothing new, going around the Congress to further the goals of the administration,” he said in an interview.
Perry added, “[Iran] is clearly and obviously playing for time. They are enriching way beyond — way, way, way beyond — the capacity and the levels needed for a peaceful nuclear energy program, and they have been for some time.”
While proponents of reentering the deal argue it’s a key step in stabilizing the region and de-escalating potential threats, former national security adviser Robert O’Brien argued there is no indication that Iran will comply with the terms of a new agreement, projecting that the country will continue abuses despite the lifted sanctions.
“I think we had done a very good job of putting Iran in a box, and we really, we use some of the sanctions that we’re advocating now for Russia against Iran and really cut Iran off. So by the time I came into office … Iran had been using the proceeds of the JCPOA to fund terrorist activity in Yemen, in Lebanon, in Syria, and [in] Iraq and to sponsor terrorism in the world. They still are, but they have a lot of money to do it,” the former Trump administration official told reporters Wednesday. “By the time we left, Hezbollah was out doing, like, bake sales to try and raise money to pay for their soldiers because there weren’t bags of cash coming in from Iran.”
“So what concerns me now is it’s somewhat how we felt about China: If we trade it with China, we turn a blind eye to China stealing our IP trying to get richer. They become more like us and become more liberal and that sort of thing,” O’Brien said. “We had that same naive belief again with JCPOA: If we free up all this money for the Iranians, they’ll of course use it for their middle class. They’ll build a wonderful Iran but get involved in the world economy.”
O’Brien added, “And, of course, what happened was the Iranians took all that money, and they used it to work on their ICBM program — their missile program — their nuclear program, and for terrorism, and the same thing is going to happen again.”
Rep. Claudia Tenney said former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and current Prime Minister Naftali Bennett raised concerns about the United States reentering the deal during a recent trip to the country with a group of freshman lawmakers. The New York Republican added that she also spoke with U.S. Special Representative for Iran Rob Malley about the issue and fears that reentering would pose a threat to Israel, telling the Washington Examiner that “he didn’t give me a lot of hope as to where I think the administration is going” on the matter.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“They talked about the Iranian economy, diplomacy, the JCPOA, and those types of things … really not understanding its an existential threat to Israel and the U.S. if we were to go back to the JCPOA and let them have a deal. And they’re talking about letting them have a deal again,” she said of her talk with Malley.
The Trump administration abandoned the deal agreed to by the Obama administration in 2018, with Republicans alleging that the JCPOA posed a national security risk and arguing that Iran violated the terms of the agreement in the past.
“I’m just really concerned that we go into a deal where we’ve weakened our sanctions, and we’ve lost our leverage, and we’re going to have a worse deal than we even had before,” Tenney said. “So that’s one of my big concerns about dealing with Iran right now.”
