The author of a new report that found that the U.S. and its western partners gave Iran “secret” exemptions to the nuclear deal is pressing Congress to provide tougher oversight of the agreement’s details when lawmakers return to Washington this week.
September’s four-week legislative stretch is the first chance critics of the nuclear accord in Congress will have to scrutinize controversial aspects of the deal that came to light over the August congressional recess, including the “secret” loopholes and new details about a $400 million cash payment to Iran in January.
David Albright, president and founder of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, said it took him months to unearth evidence of the exemptions that allowed Iran to exceed the deal’s limits in order to meet the January implementation deadline. Those exemptions included two involving how much low-enriched uranium Tehran can keep in its nuclear facilities.
The documents providing the exemptions, he said, are not public and the language they use is highly technical. To make matters worse, the Obama administration won’t address whether the exemptions exist or not in their public statements about his report.
The way the White House and State Department have defended themselves against the new evidence of secret exemptions, he said, are “typical straw man arguments” taking issue with the definition of the word secret or arguing that there were no concrete deadlines Iran was facing.
“They seem allergic to discussing the actual issues we’re raising” about whether the exemptions exist or not, Albright told the Washington Examiner in an interview Friday. “It is really a deliberate distortion of what we’ve been saying and an unwillingness to deal with the issues.”
Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector, cites anonymous “knowledgeable” officials in his report. He points out that Congress has all the documents showing the exemptions but doesn’t have the technical knowledge to find them because they are not described as exemptions in the documents and are buried in complicated language.
“It makes sense for Congress to find the answers themselves and to insist that it be made public,” he said. “They can look at these documents, they can hold hearings.”
But even questioning technical experts during hearings, he said, will not suffice. To really understand and pore over the documents in the right away, he says the Senate and House foreign affairs committees need to hire technical experts as full-time staffers.
“Far too much is being kept secret and too many decisions are being made outside independent scrutiny,” he said. “Congress is not technically equipped to deal with the details of this deal. They need some type of technical help.”
Albright suggested the key committees hire staffers who have the right security clearances and scientific backgrounds “so they can see all the information and they can make independent judgments about it and what can be publicized and what cannot.”
Too many of the documents about the deal the administration has provided Congress include a mixing of classified and unclassified information, critics say. This co-mingling obscures important facts from the public because most lawmakers err on the side of caution in avoid publicly discussing details about the deal that may be classified.
Albright doesn’t consider himself a critic of last year’s landmark nuclear pact in the larger sense, and his group has not formally opposed or supported it, he said.
Instead, he views his think tank’s role as providing accountability.
“We’ve always defined our role as checking, verifying, holding government accountable, and we are deeply troubled that the information is being held back, and when results are presented, the messenger is always attacked,” he said.
Rep. Ed Royce, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, over the August congressional recess criticized President Obama for failing to disclose details about the $400 million cash payment to Iran.
The California Republican argued that it amounted to a “ransom” for Tehran’s release of U.S. prisoners because it came on the same day as their release even if the payment was technically made to satisfy another part of the deal.
Asked about Albright’s report on the “secret exemptions” for Iran, Royce argued those changes to the deal should have been publicly disclosed.
“At the first chance the Obama [administration] had to hold Iran to the strict conditions of the agreement, they blinked,” he said. “That lays the groundwork for Tehran to further weaken the deal to their advantage.”
“Any changes to a public agreement should be made publicly to ensure transparency and accountability,” he added.
Asked about the “secret” exemptions, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he would continue to push his bipartisan bill to expand and extend sanctions on Iran for continued violations of international laws outside the nuclear deal.
“The administration has been willing to accommodate Iran at every turn to implement a flawed agreement that granted Tehran billions in sanction relief and paved the way for industrialization of its nuclear program,” he said in a statement to the WaExaminer.
“As many of us warned, Iran has only grown more hostile, and now in the absence of resolve from the White House, I am hopeful Congress will act in the coming months to pass our legislation to counter Iranian aggression,” he added.
Corker co-authored the bill along with Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Democratic Sens. Bob Menendez of New Jersey and Joe Manchin of West Va., and introduced it in July.
The measure, dubbed the Countering Iranian Threats Act of 2016, expands sanctions for ballistic missile development, support for terrorism and other illicit Iranian actions, provides new sanctions for the transfer of conventional weapons to and form Iran.
In addition, it would extend through 2026 the expiring Iran Sanctions Act, which provides broad swath of sanctions over Iran’s nuclear and missile activities, including over its trade and banking sectors. In addition, the proposal would prohibit Iran’s financial institutions from engaging in dollar-based financial transactions with banks in third-party countries.
The Wall Street Journal in April reported that the Obama administration was poised to allow Iran limited access to U.S. dollars as part of lifting sanctions on Tehran.
A Corker aide said the committee has yet to finalize the complete fall schedule, but “we expect there to be a number of opportunities for members to question the administration about a wide range of issues, including Iran.”
