Bravo! These two great Americans make me have hope for the politicians we elect. They’re doing a damn good job of exposing the phony Iran deal. They both are veterans and super smart so maybe they’ve been able to outsmart the Obama thugs. I love these guys!
Rep. Mike Pompeo (R – Kan.) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R – Ark.) have a lot in common. Both are army veterans and both are graduates of Harvard Law School. And both have been doing a great job of exposing aspects of the nuclear deal with Iran that the administration would rather keep quiet.
This week it was reported that an inquiry from Pompeo got the State Department to admit that the nuclear deal was never signed and is not “legally binding.”
Julia Frifield, the Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs, wrote in response to Pompeo’s inquiry if he could see the signed agreement, in a letter reproduced at the congressman’s website, that the nuclear deal was not binding and that it was not signed by any party. The key parts of the letter read:
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document …
The success of the JCPOA will depend not on whether it is legally binding or signed, but rather on the extensive verification measures we have put in place, as well as Iran’s understanding that we have the capacity to re-impose — and ramp up — our sanctions if Iran does not meet its commitments.
Frifield asserted that the JCPOA was not a signed agreement but “reflections of political commitments” between Iran and the P5+1 nations – the United States, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany.
Pompeo responded, “For the State Department to try to defend the unsigned and non-binding Iran nuclear agreement by calling it a ‘political commitment’ is about as absurd as the terms of the deal itself. … Instead of forging an agreement with Iran that will protect Americans and prevent the world’s largest state sponsor of terror from obtaining a nuclear weapon, the Obama administration caved to Iranian bullies and serial nuclear cheaters. Unsigned, this agreement is nothing more than a press release and just about as enforceable.”
Pompeo, of course, knew that the deal was unsigned, but he got the State Department to admit it.
What Cotton’s letter did was expose the administration’s ploy to evade Congressional oversight and still achieve the permanence of a treaty by going to the U.N. Security Council.
The non-binding nature of the nuclear non-agreement isn’t the only subterfuge that Cotton and Pompeo have exposed. It was also their questioning that led to the discovery of the secret side deals between Iran and the IAEA. One of the side deals allowed Iran to collect its own samples at the Parchin military base, an arrangement that non-proliferation experts Olli Heinonen, a former deputy director of the IAEA, and David Albright, head of the Institute for Science and International Security, said undermined the effectiveness of the JCPOA. (The scandal of self-inspection of Parchin had previously been brought up by Sen. Robert Menendez (D – N.J.) and Sen. James Risch (R – Idaho).)
Cotton and Pompeo have been very good at exposing the weakness of the deal that the media wouldn’t otherwise have reported. No doubt in the coming months Iran will continue testing the administration and the administration will continue retreating exposing further weaknesses in the deal.
