John Kerry on the Iran deal: a litany of lies

Lee Smith, writing for the Weekly Standard, accuses Secretary of State John Kery of “making stuff up” with respect to the nuclear deal with Iran. Smith (or the headline writer) is being polite. Kerry is flat out lying.

Let’s look at some examples. First, having given up on “anytime, anywhere inspections,” Kerry now claims that this was never the administration’s position and that, in fact, the concept is unknown to him:

Kerry took to the Sunday talk shows last week claiming that the administration had never promised anytime/anywhere inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities. . . .Anytime/anywhere, Kerry said on Face the Nation, “is a term that honestly I never heard in the four years that we were negotiating. It was not on the table.”

To the contrary, as recently as April, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes promised that the Western negotiators were going to secure anytime/anywhere inspections. Energy secretary Ernest Moniz, who sat next to Kerry throughout the Iran talks, also said, “we expect to have anywhere, anytime access” to Iranian facilities.

Kerry’s lieutenant, Wendy Sherman, was at least forthright when she said that anytime/anywhere was rhetorical overreach. The administration didn’t really mean it. Kerry preposterously maintains they didn’t even say it.

In other words, the administration has lied to the American people both coming (during the negotiations, about what it was trying to achieve) and going (in the aftermath, about what it said about what it was trying to achieve).

Kerry is also lying about what the agreement means for Hezbollah:

According to the terms of the deal, said Kerry, Iran is not allowed to fund and arm terrorist allies like Hezbollah. Nope, said the Iranians, correctly, there’s nothing like that in the deal. Indeed, the deal lifts the U.N. arms embargo.

Accordingly, Iran’s deputy foreign minister Abbas Araqchi said Iran told the Western negotiators that “we will supply arms to anyone and anywhere necessary and will import weapons from anywhere we want, and we have clarified this during the negotiations.”

Unlike Team Obama, when Iran says “anyone and anywhere,” it’s telling the truth.

Kerry also continues to lie about whether sanctions are to be lifted on Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani.

Kerry denied [that sanctions of Suleimani will be lifted] when the terms of the deal were first made public. Administration spokespersons set the record straight, explaining that, yes, U.N. nuclear-related sanctions would no longer apply to Suleimani in eight years’ time.

And yet in a press conference with Saudi foreign minister Adel Jubeir two days after the correction had been made, Kerry still insisted Suleimani was not coming off the sanctions list.

Kerry’s dishonesty becomes even more problematic now that we know about two secret side deals — one relating to Parchin, a military base believed to be part of the regime’s nuclear weapons program and the other relating to possible military dimensions of the program.

These are issues as to which the Obama administration couldn’t reach agreement with Iran. It therefore punted, allowing Iran to reach a side deal with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)

The administration knows what these deals says; it probably helped broker them. However, it has been unwilling to share the details with Congress.

Apparently, the administration expects the American people to trust that these side deals are fine. We should not trust any President on a matter as important as this. Given John Kerry’s serial dishonesty about the deal, trusting this administration should be out of the question.

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