Todd: Iran Letter ‘Stupid,’ ‘Dangerous Precedent’

NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd blasted the letter to Iran written by 47 Republican Senators as “stupid” and a “dangerous precedent” on Thursday’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” on MSNBC.

“I think you’re seeing a whole bunch of [Republicans]– not really — you almost wonder, did they not realize what they were signing on to, did they not realize, sort of how big of a deal this was going to be or how much it was going to be promoted? It is — look, let’s just look at the political mistake of the letter. You’re now these 47 Republicans, so now you own diplomacy failure, you get to own a piece of that. That’s not on you, if you wanted to make a bipartisan case against the deal, well you’ve partisanized the issue and you’ve scared Democrats away…you can forget the actual policy, and the historical precedent, all of this other stuff, just on political front it was stupid” he stated.

Todd continued, “do unto others as you want done unto you if you’re President of the United States. The fact of the matter is…you start undermining — if the President of the United States, who is tasked with conducting America’s foreign policy and negotiating these deals, if we are sending a message to the world that he gets undermined immediately at home, and the president’s word can’t be taken, and this is the way we’re going to conduct our business around the world, we’re not going to get anything done. And this is a — this is why this was such a dangerous precedent to set. I know that there’s this push on the right, ‘well, Nancy Pelosi went to Syria and Ted Kennedy was doing quiet talks’ — this, A. is on a scale we’ve never seen before, and B. when did I live in a world if two wrongs make a right? If that was wrong then, this is wrong now.”

He concluded by saying the letter was “playing into his [Iran’s Supreme Leader] hands in the negotiations, you’ve weakened the hand of the negotiators, which by the way, and here’s another thing that, it’s too simplistic that people have done too much. There are six nations that are negotiating with the Iranians here. It is a P5+1, there’s five other nations, the idea — this simple-minded way of framing this, that some want to frame on the right, that the president is the one unilaterally negotiating with the Iranians, is hogwash, you have the Chinese that are there, the Russians are there, the Germans are, the French are there, the British are there…there are a lot of different ways this is going, the US is in — this is very precarious, so to sort of throw it in as if this is just some typical red versus blue stuff is just — it’s sad to watch it this– sort of watch the dysfunction, there used to be a foreign policy bipartisan club and it’s — it’s dwindling.”

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