Congress will have to vote on President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran without ever seeing documents that detail important verification issues that lawmakers have been requesting for months, a key lawmaker said.
Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., has been among those who have demanded access to the side agreements between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency. The Associated Press published a draft copy of one such agreement last week, further fueling the controversy.
“I can’t imagine I’m going to get to see what an AP reporter saw,” Pompeo said. “I think that tells you all that you need to know. I know that does for me.”
On Monday, Pompeo met with a group of reporters after receiving a briefing on the verification measures from the Energy Department.
The location of the meeting with reporters — Cafe Milano in Georgetown — was no coincidence. The restaurant was a favorite of Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubair when he was ambassador in Washington and the place where Iranian agents plotted to assassinate him in 2011. Pompeo said he chose the location to emphasize how the president’s nuclear deal, which he opposes, would empower Iran’s terrorist activities.
“If the Iranians had their way, we wouldn’t be here. And we’re about to give the Iranians enough money so that they can have their way,” he said. “And I think that is a sobering concept that I think a lot of my colleagues don’t appreciate about this deal.”
Pompeo is a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Overwhelming Republican support is likely to propel a resolution of disapproval of the deal to adoption by both chambers when Congress votes in September. But President Obama has promised to veto it, and Republicans are falling short of the Democratic support they need to override him.
Pompeo said it was “hard to know” whether the latest controversy, or the growing public distaste for the agreement, would sway more Democrats against the deal, though he noted that “my Democratic colleagues, without giving up any names, don’t defend the deal.”
The confidential side agreement details how Iran will resolve outstanding issues with the IAEA over past work widely believed to have been focused on building a nuclear weapon. The IAEA has refused to share it, though the agency’s director general, Yukiya Amano, did brief members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on its contents on Aug. 5.
The Obama administration, which also has not seen the final side deal, has supported the U.N. nuclear watchdog’s desire to keep it confidential. The White House has insisted it is confident in the agency’s ability to certify Iran’s compliance with outstanding requests by the Dec. 15 deadline, which was set in the broader nuclear agreement worked out July 14 in Vienna. That certification is the key to giving Iran relief from international sanctions that have crippled its economy and isolated it from the international financial system.
Pompeo said he’s not satisfied with officials telling him the United States has no right to the text of the side deal.
“I’d like to find the document that prohibits the United States from asking for an agreement that is part of something that every member of Congress is going to be asked to vote on,” he told reporters.
Those concerns have been fueled since the AP, citing the draft copy of a part of the side deal it obtained, reported Wednesday that Iran would be allowed to use its own inspectors at the Parchin military base, where the United States and other nations believe illicit nuclear weapons work was done in the past. This is a highly unusual step that has been criticized by former arms inspectors since the AP story broke.
Iran has had more than a decade to clean up the Parchin site since U.S. officials believe it last worked on nuclear weapons there in 2003, and intelligence experts don’t expect much to be left there for international inspectors to find. The issue has become a test of the credibility of the system set up in the broader nuclear deal to ensure that Iran’s program remains peaceful.
Though U.S. officials insist inspectors will have access to military sites in the future, Iran has refused to allow that. And Pompeo called the elaborate scheme in the side deal to get around the denial of access for international inspectors to Parchin a “Rube Goldberg device” that would set a bad precedent for the future.
“It’s about the political pressure that will be brought to bear,” he said, noting that he has not gotten a straight answer to the question of whether IAEA inspectors will have needed access to military sites under the broader nuclear agreement.
“When we got into a fight about Parchin, how did we resolve it? We resolved it without the IAEA having access to that facility,” he said. “My guess is this is about as good as we will ever do at a military site.”
