President Obama made a brief swing through the State Department Thursday evening for a private victory reception on the Iran deal held by Secretary of State John Kerry for all the agency staff involved in the intense, months-long negotiations.
The State Department stop was not on the president’s public schedule, and reporters were not allowed to accompany the president inside. Reporters were instead held in vans for nearly 20 minutes before Obama rejoined the motorcade and headed back to the White House.
The president made the unscheduled stop as he was headed back to the White House from a closed-door roundtable at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
The nuclear deal between Iran, the U.S. and five world powers was reached in July after months of stalled negotiations. It would lift more than $100 billion in international economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for commitments to reduce its capacity to develop a nuclear bomb.
Over the August recess, enough Democrats came forward to support the deal to sustain a presidential veto of a congressional resolution disapproving of the agreement. Republicans this week made last-ditch, but largely symbolic, efforts to try to prevent the deal from going forward even as they admit they cannot overturn it but only offer legal challenges to it.
