Ambassador Wendy Sherman, lead negotiator for the Iran nuclear agreement, on Thursday defended the Iran deal narrative presented by senior Obama adviser Ben Rhodes in his controversial New York Times Magazine profile.
The profile paints Rhodes as a Machiavellian media manipulator who relayed a “largely manufactured” timeline of the nuclear deal to the press, think tanks, and the like (what Rhodes calls an “echo chamber”), in order to capture popular support for it. The author of the piece, David Samuels, writes that Rhodes crafted a “politically useful” “new reality:” he made it seem like nuclear negotiations with Iran began in 2013 with the election of President Hasan Rouhani, a “moderate” who allowed “a policy of “openness,”” though in reality they had begun months or years before.
