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President Donald Trump repeatedly criticized his predecessor for signing “the worst deal ever negotiated” and vowed on the campaign trail that he would “dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.” Now, with the Obama administration out of office, new damaging details are coming to light, exposing the hidden costs of the Iran nuclear agreement and the lengths the previous administration was willing to go to secure the deal.
In order to guarantee Iran’s support for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 international agreement to curb Iranian nuclear ambitions, President Barack Obama negotiated a number of concessions, including unfreezing billions of dollars of Iranian assets, international sanctions relief and a prisoner swap.
On January 17, 2016, Obama announced that five Americans were “coming home” after years of imprisonment in Iran, and seven Iranians, previously in U.S. custody would be returned to their homes. He told the American people that none of the individuals being released were “charged with terrorism or any violent offenses” assuring that “they’re civilians.”
Earlier this week, Politico reported that not only were the seven Iranians released under the deal not the average “civilians” described by President Obama, but the administration also released an additional 14 fugitives who were facing charges in the United States. Those fugitives’ cases ranged from sanctions evasion to the illegal procurement of weapons technology, to severe violations of American and international counter-proliferation efforts.
President Obama and administration officials “weren’t telling the whole story,” Politico reported. The Department of Justice was ordered to drop charges and international arrest warrants against the 14 Iranian suspects, without the Obama administration disclosing who the individuals were, what they were accused of doing and the ongoing threat they may still pose.
One of the most prominent fugitives was Seyed Abolfazl Shahab Jamili, who was allegedly involved in the procurement of “thousands” of pieces of technology through China to be used in the uranium enrichment centrifuges. Amin Raven was charged with smuggling U.S. military antennas out of the country as part of a procurement network that provided Iran with high-tech components for an especially deadly type of IED (improvised explosive device) used by Shiite militias to kill hundreds of American troops in Iraq.
A former federal law enforcement supervisor centrally involved in the hunt for Iranian arms traffickers and nuclear smugglers told Politico, “They didn’t just dismiss a bunch of innocent business guys.”
This report follows only a week after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced that the administration will be conducting a thorough interagency review of the deal, led by the National Security Council, “that will evaluate whether suspension of sanctions related to Iran pursuant to the JCPOA is vital to the national security interests of the United States.”
After the State Department released its assessment, President Trump stated that “Iran has not lived up to the spirit of the agreement.” Trump would not indicate whether that failure meant the United States would withdraw or “tear up” the deal, as he stated on the campaign trail, only that the agreement was going to be carefully reviewed by his administration.
On Wednesday, Energy Secretary Rick Perry told Sinclair Broadcast Group that he is concerned about what the Obama administration agreed to and how it was presented to the American people. “I didn’t think it was a good deal when we signed it,” he said. “I think we’re finding out things about it on a regular basis that the American people didn’t know about or was misrepresented.”
He continued, “If this was one of those things where the president was just hell-bent on having a legacy and willing to trade away some very important issues to get that, then I think that’s going to reflect rather poorly on the previous administration.”
Under the Trump administration, it is likely that new details of the Iran deal that were either hidden or papered over by the previous administration will come to light, Congressman Scott Perry (R-Penn.) said on Friday.
“The tenets of the deal were supposed to — by statute — be given to the American people through their congressional representatives, and I think it’s clear that the past administration refused to do that,” he said. Every detail of the agreement, the congressman continued, “should come into light so all Americans can understand the full implications” of the nuclear agreement.
The reason the Obama administration did not reveal some of these details, Rep. Perry argued, was because it “would have been embarrassing” and the American people would not have supported it, even to the limited degree that they did.
Back when the deal was in the final stages of negotiation in August 2015 only 27 percent of voters polled supported the deal. That number has spiked to a majority of support for the agreement according to a recent poll.
In light of the Iranian presidential election taking place on May 19, Rep. Perry suggested that while Americans question Trump’s commitment to the JCPOA, they should also consider whether Tehran might decide to walk away from the agreement. Criticism from conservative hardliners running in the election have been intensely critical of the deal and the economic benefits Iran received as a result of international sanctions relief.
Congressman Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) was never a supporter of the Iran nuclear agreement. He encouraged the Trump administration not to tear up the deal, but take the new information being revealed “strengthen the case to toughen our approach to Iran” regarding its non-nuclear provocations including support for international terrorism, violations of human rights and its ballistic missile tests.
The secret prisoner swap revealed by Politico this week, is a particularly sensitive issue for Deutch who has been fighting to get one of his constituents, Robert “Bob” Levinson, released from Iran. Levinson, an FBI agent who was working in Iran as a CIA consultant, was detained back in 2007 and is the longest-held American in Iranian captivity.
“With this story in particular, I hope there is a renewed focus by the administration on … Bob Levinson,” Deutch said. Iran has so far refused to cooperate with the United States on Levinson’s case, despite assuring the Obama administration that they would provide information on his whereabouts.
The release of 14 Iranian fugitives is just another in a series of after-the-fact revelations on the actual content of the Iranian nuclear agreement.
Last August, the Wall Street Journal first reported on what appeared to be a $400 million ransom payment from Washington to Tehran. The Journal revealed how the U.S. carefully choreographed the release of $400 million to Iran at the exact time the plane carrying five U.S. prisoners took off on January 17, 2015. The U.S. owed Iran the $400 million as settlement for an outstanding legal claim.
Prior to that, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton and then Congressman Mike Pompeo, now Trump’s CIA director, exposed a secret “side deal” Iran reached with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). During the 60-day congressional review of the deal under the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act in July 2015, the lawmakers learned that the administration knew about but failed to inform them about the existence of the side deal, the details of which still remain confidential between the IAEA and Iranian government.
he nuclear agreement was sold to skeptics in the United States and the international community on the basis of transparency, senior Iran analyst with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) Behnam Ben Taleblu said. The reality is the deal has been far from transparent.
“In the aggregate, what we now know about side deals and these payments and sanctions relief does not paint a positive picture of the deal and reinforces the notion that the Islamic Republic of Iran and not the United States is the main winner in this,” Taleblu explained.
FDD was the first organization to report last year that Iran could have received as much as $33.6 billion in cash between the start of the nuclear negotiations in 2014 and the implementation of the deal in 2016. While much of the cash represented Iran’s previously frozen assets, the organization has still not determined the exact amount transferred to Iran under the Obama administration.
Founder and president of the Endowment for Middle East Truth, Sarah Stern, argued that “the American people have a right to know what the Obama administration agreed to.” Despite assurances by President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry about the advantages of the deal, Stern noted that the agreement the United States was only 159 pages long. “The Iranian nuclear that the Majlis, the Iranian Parliament, agreed to is over 1,000 pages long.” She insisted the American people should know “what the Iranians think they agreed upon” in those hundreds of additional pages.
The first action President Trump should take is to expose the facts and full extent of deal, Stern emphasized. “I feel that we have willfully blinded ourselves,” she said. “Given how little the American people knew about the deal, Trump should absolutely get these facts out.”
Despite new revelations about the deal, many experts and officials do not want to see the United States unilaterally pull out. The permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany and the European Union were all signatories to the agreement and would be vital in leveraging any new pressure on Iran. By unilaterally withdrawing from the deal, the U.S. could lose its ability to rally the international community in condemning future Iranian ballistic missile tests, or defense technology proliferation, or sponsorship of terrorism.
Taleblu explained that Trump’s call for an interagency review will be essential as the new administration decided the path forward with Iran.
Whatever policy the president settles on, unlike the previous administration, Trump has been “carefully cultivating a fair amount of uncertainty” over next steps regarding Iran, Taleblu said. “I think out of all the audiences, he is keeping the adversary guessing the most, in this case that’s Iran. And I think it’s helpful to have Iran guessing and not know what his ultimate goal is.”
