Republican Senator Ted Cruz
Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz says the Biden administration reportedly has a secret assessment that shows the benefits from the new Iran deal are now zero.
He wrote in a tweet on Tuesday that the benefits of restoring the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran is zero because the Biden administration has allowed the Islamic Republic to make so much progress in its nuclear program.
He added the administration is “so ideologically committed to doing their deal they're refusing to make the assessment public”.
The CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) reacted to the revelation on Wednesday, saying, “Congress immediately needs to get to the bottom of this and release this assessment”.
Calling for major policy and personnel changes, Mark Dubowitz said, “The Biden administration’s Iran policy is a total failure”.
Cruz first talked about the assessment during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Tuesday, but Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Brian McKeon dodged questions about it, saying it is an assessment of the intelligence community and classified.
“Since President Biden is elected, Iran has made enormous, unprecedented progress on its nuclear program, including enriching uranium to 60 percent, deploying advanced centrifuges, and acquiring significant knowledge”, Cruz said.
He added that “the Biden administration has a secret assessment that says there is a point after which the nuclear progress would make the deal meaningless”, urging the secretary of state to reveal that point to the public.
The negotiations, which started in Vienna in April 2021, have been on a protracted pause since March 11, as the Islamic Republic demanded removing Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) from the US list of terrorist organizations.