White House press secretary Josh Earnest doubled down on President Obama’s remarks that Republican critics of the Iran deal share “common cause” with hardliners in Iran that shout “Death to America.”
Earnest said it is a “statement of fact” that both Republicans in Congress and hardliners in Iran are opposed to the deal and want it to go down in defeat.
“You have in Iran a group of hardliners who are strongly opposed to the deal advocating for its defeat and here you have Republicans in Congress who are strongly opposed and advocating for its defeat … so they share the same position on the deal,” he said.
It’s “ironic,” he said, that Republicans who want to stop the deal are arguing that it will strengthen the hand of hardliners in Iran when those same hardliners want to sink the agreement as well.
“This actually would be a pretty good definition of irony,” he said.
Republicans have taken great exception with the comment over the last 24 hours. Sen. Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, earlier Thursday expressed deep disappointment and said he interpreted Obama’s comments as lumping Republicans and Democrats who have real questions about the deal in with Iranian hardliners in order to stifle debate over the deal.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has called on Obama to retract the statements, but Earnest said the president has no intention to do so.
One reporter pointed out that Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he disagreed with other statements the president made in his Wednesday speech saying critics of the Iran deal are the same people who got us into war in Iraq.
Earnest backed up those remarks as well, echoing Obama’s comments that “we’re hearing the same kinds of arguments from the same kinds of people,” although he excluded Cardin, who voted against the war in Iraq back in 2003, as part of the crowd advocating the Iran deal’s defeat.
“Some of them are promising that military action against Iran would be relatively easy and almost painless,” Earnest said. “Those are the same arguments that led us to war in Iraq.”
