The White House dismissed the significance of a report saying that U.S. intelligence agencies have evidence that Iran was sanitizing a suspected nuclear military site just days after sealing the nuclear deal with world powers.
Earlier Thursday Bloomberg View published a report asserting that the U.S. intelligence community has briefed members of Congress that Iran was trying to clean up evidence of nuclear development at a military site at Parchin — in broad daylight — just days after signing the deal.
While White House spokesman Josh Earnest said he couldn’t discuss specific intelligence matters, he brushed off news that Tehran was working to clean up the site as something the Obama administration “is not particularly concerned with.”
“We’re not particularly concerned that over the next few weeks they are trying to cover up something they haven’t been able to cover up over the last decade,” Earnest told reporters Thursday.
The Parchin site and exactly what occurred there was a major bone of contention during the two years of negotiations between the U.S., five world powers and Iran.
The International Atomic Energy Agency and Iran have a side deal aimed at resolving past suspicions about the Parchin site and developing a benchmark for what the new deal will allow to take place there based on this history.
The issue has become a major flashpoint between Congress and the White House because the administration did not give lawmakers the text of the deal, but instead has briefed them on what they know about it.
Wendy Sherman, undersecretary of state for political affairs and one of the Iran deal’s lead negotiators, said Wednesday that she didn’t see the final text of the so-called side deal between the International Atomic Energy Agency and Iran.
“I didn’t see the final documents. I saw the provisional documents, as did my experts,” Sherman told the Senate Banking Committee. She also defended the international agency’s refusal to share the documents with the U.S. as a standard confidentiality protocol.
Earnest said the president and other top administration officials are not concerned that they haven’t seen the final side deal because the U.S. negotiating team is well aware of its contents and has briefed members of Congress on it.
“We have taken the extraordinary steps of convening classified briefings to the entire Senate and the entire House of Representatives about what’s in the agreements,” he said. “They have the information they need to make a decision.”
