A Deal Founded on Lies

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (left) meets with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif on April 22, 2016, in New York.
BRYAN R. SMITH/AFP/Getty Images

A Deal Founded on Lies

Iran lied to complete the nuclear deal—and so did the Obama administration.

Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a three-day trip to Europe and Britain, meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and United Kingdom Prime Minister Theresa May. Before boarding his plane in Israel on June 4, Netanyahu said, “I will meet there with three leaders and will discuss two subjects: Iran and Iran.” In May, United States President Donald Trump terminated America’s involvement in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (jcpoa) implemented by his predecessor, Barack Obama. But European nations have continued to uphold the agreement, which removed sanctions against Iran tied to its development of nuclear technology. Netanyahu hoped to convince European leaders to increase pressure against Iran, which has pursued nuclear weapons, sponsors terrorism and has sworn to destroy the State of Israel. He is attempting to get them to drop the nuclear deal, which, it turns out, was founded on lies.

Prior to his departure, Netanyahu authorized Israeli intelligence agents to share with European agents information that they uncovered about Iran’s nuclear program. In January, agents from Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency, infiltrated a warehouse in southern Tehran, obtained more than 100,000 files relating to Iran’s nuclear program, and moved them to Israel overnight. In a dramatic announcement at Israel’s Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv on April 30, Netanyahu publicly unveiled the “Iranian nuclear archive.”

Much of the information contained in the archive is neither new nor surprising, but the trove of information exposes how Iran and the Obama administration lied in order to gain the support needed to sign the nuclear deal.

As the Times of Israel noted, most of what was included in the archive was already footnoted in the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (iaea) report about seven years ago.

But it’s important to reveal this trail of evidence because there are still diplomats who have been duped by Iran into believing that its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes. As Netanyahu brought out, the “files conclusively prove that Iran is brazenly lying when it says it never had a nuclear weapons program.”

And Iran continues to lie! Netanyahu then played a clip from Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif saying on April 22, “We never wanted to produce a bomb.” This was the man who negotiated with then Secretary of State John Kerry concerning the nuclear deal!

“Yes you did,” Netanyahu responded. “Yes you do. And the atomic archive proves it.”

As Netanyahu said during his speech, one of the main conclusions that can be drawn from this sample of documents is that “the Iran deal, the nuclear deal, is based on lies. It’s based on Iranian lies and Iranian deception; 100,000 files right here prove that they lied.”

The documents reveal not only that Iranian leaders lied about their nuclear weapons program in the past, but that they continue to conceal this from the world. If the program has always been for peaceful purposes, then why the need for all the deception and lies?

As Commentary pointed out in “Prelude to a Showdown?” (May 2; emphasis added throughout):

[T]he bombshell was not the information contained within these documents. The very fact that they exist was the bombshell, as was the fact that they were being housed in a facility designed to keep them secret from international inspectors. … Former Secretary of State John Kerry repeatedly assured the public and lawmakers that all of Iran’s past nuclear-weapons work would have to be disclosed to an international monitoring regime as part of the nuclear accords–or there would be no deal.

When announcing the jcpoa on July 14, 2015, then President Obama said that the iaea inspectors would “be able to access any suspicious location.” He said that “the iaea has also reached an agreement with Iran to get access that it needs to complete its investigation into the possible military dimensions of Iran’s past nuclear research.”

They’re going to have access to any suspicious location, Obama said. Iran’s nuclear weapons program generated piles of documents, documents that were put in storage. Documents that inspectors did not access. Documents that still haven’t prompted the idea to call Iranian leaders on the carpet and confront them with the obvious: You lied to us in 2015!

My father talked about this in a January 2016 Key of David program “America’s Nuclear Agreement With Iran,” saying:

[Iran’s leaders have] lied and cheated about every significant promise they ever made or any agreement they ever made. There’s NO unfettered access to all military sites. That’s what the West wanted, but they didn’t get it. “Oh, no, stay away from our military sites.” Why, this is a farce! They’re supposed to now go 10 years without building a bomb. Do you think that’s going to happen? I tell you, it is not! Bible prophecy says it is not. It is not.

As Netanyahu and my father have said, the entire deal was based on lies. Iran lied about its “peaceful” nuclear program and about coming clean to the iaea. But the bigger scandal here is the fact that the Obama administration lied in order to get the deal done!

Remember the story two years ago about an aspiring novelist named Ben Rhodes who became a top foreign-policy adviser to President Obama? He was instrumental in convincing people to believe and support the idea that the Obama administration reached out to Iranian officials back in 2013.

Notice what the New York Times wrote on May 5, 2016:

Rhodes’s innovative campaign to sell the Iran deal is likely to be a model for how future administrations explain foreign policy to Congress and the public. The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented—that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country—was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal.

In order to sell the nuclear deal to Congress and the American people, this “boy wonder,” as the New York Times called him, created the false narrative that the new moderates in power in Iran were willing to dismantle their nuclear program and make peace.

But as the New York Times brought out, “Obama’s closest advisers always understood him to be eager to do a deal with Iran as far back as 2012, and even since the beginning of his presidency.”

That is astounding! Were they really this deceitful and dishonest? Did they really tell these many audacious lies? They did.

“Today, after two years of negotiations,” said President Obama in that same July 14, 2015, speech, “the United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not.”

Notice that he said two years of negotiations. That’s because it was mid-2013 that the Iranians supposedly voted in “moderates,” which really has no bearing because the candidates are handpicked by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But the fact is, the Obama administration had been negotiating with Iran for several years.

As the New York Times brought out, the president’s statement was technically accurate—there had been formal negotiations for two years on the jcpoa. But it was highly misleading because “the most meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran had begun in mid-2012, many months before Rouhani and the ‘moderate’ camp were chosen ….”

Then as formal negotiations progressed with the Iranians, Rhodes said that there was an onslaught of experts who “were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.” They were working from the Obama administration’s talking points! Then all of the clueless reporters who supported President Obama began latching onto those statements and quoted them. Everyone was working from the narrative the “boy wonder” created. As my father writes in his booklet Great Again, they just covered themselves in a cloak of deceit. In some cases, they even bragged about their lies.

And how did the radical leftists react when Netanyahu came forward with all of these facts? Many dismissed the documents, saying they didn’t contain much new information. Trita Parsi, chief of the National Iranian American Council, said it’s like the Mossad just “raided and plundered the iaea, not a secret Iranian storehouse.”

Others said, Well, there’s no information saying Iran has resumed its nuclear program. The truth is, even if Iran does hold off for the duration of the nuclear deal, the clock is winding down fast! Once the time limit is up, it’s all hands on deck for a nuclear bomb—which the jcpoa provides for.

Other radical leftists said following Netanyahu’s speech, We knew Iran wasn’t an honest actor, that’s why we signed the deal! This is all “well-known, pre-Iran-deal history,” said Rhodes. But that’s not how he and Obama sold the deal to the public just three years ago! They think they can just revise history. Back then the narrative was, There are moderates in power now! They want to negotiate and dismantle their nuclear program!

Remember the Iranian Green Movement in June 2009? The sanctions on Iran were taking effect, and Iranian citizens were rising up, disgruntled with the mullahs. But rather than support the Iranian people, who did President Obama side with? The Iranian mullahs, of course—because he had been working on a deal with them. If you listen to his speeches from early 2009, this was clearly at the top of his agenda coming into office.

Just look at the terms of the deal. America gave Iran $150 billion for the deal, $1.8 billion in cash. The Obama administration also conducted a prisoner swap that turned dangerous criminals loose, and then lied to the public that they weren’t actually that dangerous.

No wonder so many Americans voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

With President Trump considering the fate of the nuclear deal earlier this year, Netanyahu couldn’t have released his information at a better time. It’s no coincidence that this information was released in the lead-up to Mr. Trump’s decision to scrap the deal.

My father called the deal the worst foreign-policy disaster in America’s history! Read his article from 2015 titled “Negotiating Human Survival.” He warned, “Though many don’t realize it yet, the Western world—and especially America—has been humiliated through this deal. The Iranian reaction should be enough to trumpet that fact.”

My father continued:

America and Britain don’t have the will to stop Iran. The Bible prophesies the complete collapse of will and power in America and Britain. In Leviticus 26:19, God says that He will break the pride of Israel’s power. America’s capitulation in these negotiations is a prime example of this prophecy being fulfilled.

Bible prophecy shows that a European power is going to rise up on the world scene to deal with Iran the way that America refuses to. My father’s article will explain all of this to you and where it will all lead.

If you would like to read more details about the documents that Netanyahu exposed, read “Benjamin Netanyahu’s Unsurprising Revelation.”