In a preview of things to come later this week, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee blasted President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal Sunday.
“Look at what they’re saying in Iran, look at what they’re already doing. They’re still chanting ‘death to America, death to Israel,’ but they’re putting it into practice in their new … missile programs that they’re announcing,” said Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., in an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox News.
Iran announced last month that it would be engaging in “ballistic missile war games.”
“People are saying Iran is going to change. Iran is not [changing] after this agreement,” Royce continued. “The Ayatollah already gave a speech the other day in which he said, we are not going to change our adversarial position with the United States, nor with respect to Israel, nor Yemen, nor Syria, nor Iraq.”
Royce’s committee will meet on Wednesday to review the terms of the deal. It falls under the purview of a 60-day congressional review period established by legislation Congress passed earlier this year.
“The other element of this that people are not focusing on is this $100 billion dollars that is going to go out of escrow and back into the hands of the Iranians,” Royce added, referencing the frozen assets that the U.S. will return as part of the deal. The companies receiving the cash, Royce said, “have been taken over” by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
“The Quds forces that are doing these assassinations overseas, and these attacks, and overthrowing governments like Yemen, these are the forces in Iran” that control the companies, Royce said. “So this is what we’re asking members of the Congress to think about.”
The House is expected to disapprove of the Iranian nuclear deal by a large margin. Democrats in the Senate had accumulated 38 votes in favor as of Friday, a number sufficient to uphold a veto from President Obama.
