Three members of President Joe Biden’s team of negotiators on a return to the Iran nuclear deal have left the talks in Vienna, with two of them leaving because they reportedly disagreed with the weak stance that the administration was taking.
The Wall Street Journal broke the story on Monday:
U.S. officials confirmed over the weekend that Richard Nephew, the deputy special envoy for Iran, has left the team. Mr. Nephew, an architect of previous economic sanctions on Iran, had advocated a tougher posture in the current negotiations, and he hasn’t attended the talks in Vienna since early December.
Two other members of the team, which is led by State Department veteran Robert Malley, have stepped back from the talks, the people familiar said, because they also wanted a harder negotiating stance.
Among the issues that have divided the team are how firmly to enforce existing sanctionsand whether to cut off negotiations as Iran drags them out while its nuclear program advances, the people familiar with the negotiations said.
The divisions come at a pivotal time, with U.S. and European officials warning that only a few weeks remain to rescue the 2015 deal before Iran acquires the know-how and capability to quickly produce enough nuclear fuel for a bomb. Under the agreement, the U.S. lifted most international sanctions on Tehran in exchange for strict but temporary limits on Iran’s nuclear work. The Trump administration exited the agreement, seeing it as insufficient to restrain Iran, and the Biden administration is trying to reverse course.
The team is led by Robert Malley, who is often criticized for a weak posture on Iran and on terrorist regimes in general.
As Breitbart News reported exactly one year ago: Under former President Barack Obama, Malley, then a national security official, was one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the Iran deal. He was also initially kicked off of Obama’s first presidential campaign after reports emerged he had met with members of the Hamas terror group.”
In a press briefing on Tuesday, State Department Spokesperson Ned Price brushed aside questions about the departures from the negotiating team, saying that they were routine personnel changes.
He claimed that the “previous administration left us with a terrible set of options” on Iran’s nuclear program, without noting that the Obama-Biden administration’s Iran deal bypassed the Senate and committed the U.S. to accepting Iran’s return to nuclear research after roughly one decade.
The Iran deal also did not stop Iran’s ballistic missile program, its support for terroerist proxies, or its human rights abuses.
Rep. Michael Waltz reacted to the news of the departure from the Iran negotiating team by accusing Biden of putting “national security at risk,” the UK Daily Mail reported.
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken complained in December, after nearly a year of futile efforts at talks on returning to the nuclear deal, that Iran did not seem to be “serious” about the negotiations, as the regime exploited the opportunity of Biden’s diplomatic outreach to accelerate its nuclear program.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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