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| Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) |
President Obama promised that
his nuclear deal with Iran would not be “based on trust” but rather
“unprecedented verification.” Now it turns out Obama’s verification regime is
based on trust after all — trust in two secret side agreements negotiated
exclusively between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that
apparently no one (including the Obama administration) has seen.
Worse, Obama didn’t
even reveal the existence of these secret side deals to Congress when he
transmitted the nuclear accord to Capitol Hill. The agreements were uncovered,
completely by chance, by two members of Congress — Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.)
and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) — who were in Vienna meeting with the
U.N.-releated agency.
In an interview,
Pompeo told me that he and Cotton were meeting with the deputy director of the
IAEA and the agency’s two top Iran negotiators just days after the nuclear
accord was announced, when they asked how the agency will carry out
verification at the Iranian military complex at Parchin. IAEA officials told
them, quite casually, that the details were all covered in agreements
negotiated between the IAEA and the Iranian government. It was the first they
had heard of the side deals.
Pompeo says they asked
whether they could see those agreements. He says IAEA officials replied, “ ‘Oh
no, of course not, no, you’re not going to get to see those.’ And so everybody
on our side of the table asked, ‘Has Secretary Kerry seen these?’ ‘No,
Secretary Kerry hasn’t seen them. No American is ever going to get to see
them.’ ”
It turns out that only
the two parties — the IAEA and Iran — get to see the actual agreements (though
you can see a picture of Iranian and IAEA officials holding up what appear to
be the secret accords
here).
In other words, Obama
is gambling our national security and handing over $150 billion in sanctions
relief to Iran, based on secret agreements negotiated between the IAEA and Iran
that no U.S. official has seen.
“We need to see these
documents in order to evaluate whether or not verification is ample to make
such a big concession to the Iranians,” Pompeo says. “No member of Congress
should be asked to vote on an agreement of this historic importance absent
knowing what the terms of the verification process are.”
In fact, the Obama administration’s failure to transmit
these side deals to Congress is a violation of the law. The Iran Nuclear
Agreement Review Act, which Obama signed into law, explicitly states that the
president must transmit the nuclear agreement along with “all related materials
and annexes.” That clearly covers any side agreements covering the verification
of Iran’s compliance.
Susan Rice told
reporters the
administration “provided Congress with all of the documents that we drafted or
were part of drafting and all documents shared with us by the IAEA.” Sorry,
that’s not what the law requires.
But the administration cannot
hand over what it apparently does not have. For Pompeo, that raises even more
troubling questions. “Why on earth is the president letting the negotiations
[on verification] be negotiated by someone other than us?” he asks. How can it
be that the administration would “do a deal with the world’s largest state
sponsor of terror, that’s spent its entire existence cheating, and we would
sign off on a deal with them whose core provisions are completely unknown to
our side? It’s remarkable.”
What is in the secret side
deals? According to Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), one of the side deals governing
inspections of the Parchin military complex allows Iran to collect its own soil
samples, instead of IAEA inspectors. That is like letting Lance Armstrong
collect his own blood samples for a doping investigation. “I suspect if we’re
able to actually go over [these agreements], you find half a dozen that you
would stare at and realize we really didn’t get verification,” Pompeo says.
Congress should insist on
seeing the side deals before it votes on the Iran accord. The only way to stop
the agreement is for Congress to override the president’s veto through a
resolution of disapproval with a two-thirds vote in both houses. That would
require 13 Senate Democrats and 45 House Democrats to vote no — which would have
been highly unlikely until the revelation of these secret deals.
It remains to be seen whether the revelation of the
secret side deals will make it impossible for Democrats to vote in favor of the
Iran agreement. How, Pompeo asks, can they explain to their constituents that
they voted for a nuclear deal with Iran without knowing how it will be
verified?
“My mission in the next 45 days is to convince 45 House
Democrats to override the veto,” Pompeo says. “It’s a long climb, but this is
important.”
