President Donald Trump says he will be announcing his decision on the Iran nuclear deal on Tuesday at the White House.
The president is expected to say in remarks that he’s pulling the U.S. out of the 2015 agreement he inherited from the previous administration.
Aside from complaining about it consistently during his campaign, Trump harangued it as a ‘very badly negotiated’ agreement in a tweet today that took aim at the secretary of state who helped to broker it.
The comment followed his remarks at a recent news conference that the deal was made ‘decayed foundations’ and was not structured to last.
‘Should have never, ever been made. I blame Congress. I blame a lot of people for it,’ Trump said.
President Donald Trump says he will be announcing his decision on the Iran nuclear deal on Tuesday at the White House
Trump has until May 12 to decide whether he wants to allow a sanctions waiver that applies to Tehran to expire.
If the sanctions go back into effect, the U.S. will be in violation of the agreement effectively ending its participation. It will then be up to Iran to decide it, too, wants to walk away from the deal.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani pledged his commitment to the pact on Monday that the European Union, China and Russia plan to remain in, regardless of U.S. action.
Trump for his part has said he would be willing to sign on to a companion agreement that encompasses the nuclear aspects of the current one and applies new pressure to Iran to abandon its ballistic missiles program, end terrorist financing and broker a peace agreement between the ruling government and rebels in Syria.
France’s Emmanuel Macron told Trump last month that he would pursue such an agreement on behalf of Europe. The French president told reporters afterward that he suspected Trump would leave the 2015 accord in the meantime to hasten the process up.
Hinting at the action he is anticipated to take tomorrow Trump told Macron publicly, ‘I think we will have a great shot at doing a much bigger maybe deal, maybe not deal. We’re going to find out, but we’ll know fairly soon.’
He also said ‘nobody knows what I’m going to do on the 12th, although, Mr. President, you have a pretty good idea — but we’ll see.
‘But we’ll see also, if I do what some people expect, whether or not it will be possible to do a new deal with solid foundations,’ he said. ‘Because this a deal with decayed foundations. It’s a bad deal. It’s a bad structure. It’s falling down.’
Trump’s White House spokeswoman and the president appeared to be on different wavelengths about the timing of that declaration on Monday, with Sarah Sanders saying at news conference that he would be making an ‘announcement on what his decision is soon’ only to have Trump tweet minutes later that it would come on Tuesday
Trump charged then in his most confrontational comments yet to Tehran that, ‘If Iran threatens us in any way, they will pay a price like few countries have ever paid.’
Going further, Trump said a press conference last Monday: ‘I’m not telling you what I’m doing, but a lot of people think they know. And on or before the 12th, we’ll make a decision.
‘That doesn’t mean we won’t negotiate a real agreement,’ he added.
Trump’s White House spokeswoman and the president appeared to be on different wavelengths about the timing of that declaration on Monday, with Sarah Sanders saying at news conference that he would be making an ‘announcement on what his decision is soon’ only to have Trump tweet minutes later that it would come on Tuesday.
‘As you know he’s got a few days to do that, and we’ll let you know when he’s ready to make a decision on it,’ she said.
She also suggested that former Secretary of State John Kerry needed to butt out of negotiations.
Trump had already spoken out on Iran on Monday, prior to the tweet promoting an Iran decision. He blasted former Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday following news reports that the Obama administration official has secretly met with foreign governments in a bid to save the much-maligned Iran deal.
The Boston Globe reported Friday that Kerry quietly met two weeks ago with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, and had separate confabs with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and French President Emmanuel Macron – all to strategize against Trump’s intention to upend the deal.
‘The United States does not need John Kerry’s possibly illegal Shadow Diplomacy on the very badly negotiated Iran Deal,’ the president wrote Monday on Twitter. ‘He was the one that created this MESS in the first place!’
Kerry brokered the deal for the Obama administration. Trump has threatened to reimpose sanctions as of May 12, the deadline for certifying Iran’s compliance with its obligations under the arrangement.
Trump on Monday called Kerry’s intervention ‘possibly illegal’ and blamed him for the current arrangement that gave Tehran sanctions relief but would allow it to build nuclear bombs as soon as 2027
Kerry (left) is seen with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in 2016; Kerry met with Zarif last month for secret talks about how to undermine Trump’s bid to kill the nuclear deal
Sanders told reporters on Monday that Kerry’s advocacy won’t make a difference as Trump weighs what to do.
‘I don’t think that we would take advice from somebody who created what the president sees as one of the worst deals ever made,’ she said. ‘I don’t see why we would start listening to him now.’
A spokesman for Kerry issued a statement late Monday morning, defending his apparent habit of lobbying foreign governments as a civilian.
‘I think every American would want every voice possible urging Iran to remain in compliance with the nuclear agreement that prevented a war,’ the statement said.
‘Secretary Kerry stays in touch with his former counterparts around the world just like every previous Secretary of State. Like America’s closest allies, he believes it is important that the nuclear agreement, which took the world years to negotiate, remain effective as countries focus on stability in the region.’
But whether or not Kerry’s flurry of clandestine diplomacy bears fruit, he will be criticized for carrying out the duties of the job he lost when Trump became president.
A federal law called the Logan Act makes it a felony for unauthorized civilians to conduct foreign policy with nations that are in the midst of a dispute with the United States.
Kerry has also been meeting with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (left) and French President Emmanuel Macron (right) in attempts to salvage the Iran deal
Kerry could run afoul of the Logan Act, a 200+ year-old federal law that made it a felony for civilians to conduct foreign policy without authorization
The statute, known as the Logan Act, dates back to 1799 and has only been used twice to indict people – in 1803 and 1852. Neither was convicted.
One defendant, a Peruvian admiral, was prosecuted for writing a letter to the president of Mexico to scuttle a competitor’s bid to build a railroad connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
The other was a farmer charged with the crime of writing a newspaper article urging western U.S. states to secede and join neighboring French territories.
Some legal scholars have written that the Logan Act is unconstitutional, and only remains on the books because it hasn’t been tested in court.
Some of Trump’s own advisers were accused of violating the Logan Act during the post-election transition period in 2016 and 2017.
Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser who was fired after just weeks on the job, was originally eyed as a possible Logan Act violator when the Justice Department targeted him.
Flynn had made contact with Russia’s then-ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak to discuss how the new administration might view existing sanctions regimes imposed on Moscow, and how Trump’s team hoped the Kremlin would vote on a pending United Nations resolution condemning Israel.
Sally Yates, then the deputy attorney general, later testified that the potential for Logan Act violations was the initial justification for interrogating Flynn – who later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in connection with that grilling.
Kerry, at one time a Democratic senator for Massachusetts, has been accused of violating the Logan Act in the past.
In January he told a confidant of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that he should ‘stay strong’ and ‘play for time’ while Trump is in the White House.
Kerry told the Lebanese academic Hussein Agha that he was considering a second run for the White House in 2020, and aimed to help Palestinians in their territorial battles with Israel.
‘It is unusual for a former secretary of state to engage in foreign policy like this, as an actual diplomat and quasi-negotiator,’ Michael O’Hanlon, a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution, told the Globe, referring to Kerry’s Iran efforts this year.
‘Of course, former secretaries of state often remain quite engaged with foreign leaders, as they should, but it’s rarely so issue-specific, especially when they have just left office.’
Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu has been pushing Trump to take a more aggressive posture toward Iran, his nation’s most prolific antagonist.
Netanyahu delivered a presentation last week claiming Israel’s intelligence agency had proof that Iran ‘lied’ about its intention to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.