Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Friday’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss his call for President Trump to pull America out of the Iran nuclear deal.
Bolton said “the spin the bureaucracy was putting out” to defend the Iran deal is “complete nonsense.”
“I certainly don’t claim to know everything that went on as the administration looked at this, but I believe that the president was once again blindsided by the bureaucracy, to have to certify compliance by Iran with the nuclear deal,” he said.
Bolton condemned that certification as “contrary to fact.”
“I think this is an example of what happens when the bureaucracy isn’t brought under control. I honestly don’t think it’s going to happen again. I think the president was so outraged again this time that it’s pretty clear 90 days from now, if not before, that we’re going to have a decision how to proceed on this nuclear deal with Iran. I don’t think it will be to kind of mindlessly continue with it,” he predicted.
Bolton judged that “nobody in the White House knew what was about to happen” the first time certification was required from the Trump administration 90 days ago.
“The president wasn’t happy with it then. They watered the language down. He had Rex Tillerson go out the next day and list everything Iran was doing that we didn’t like. But the National Security Council staff, for whatever reason, didn’t take the lesson that the president said during the campaign he thought this deal was a disaster,” he recalled.
“Normally the president is in charge. You’d think the bureaucracy would say, ‘Well, if that’s what he thinks, I guess we ought to give him some options as to what to do.’ So 90 days go by after the first unforced error, and they come back and act like, ‘Well, of course we’re going to certify Iranian compliance.’ I think that’s why the president was so concerned, because obviously they weren’t listening to him,” he said.
Bolton marveled that some of the arguments put forth by the bureaucracy to keep the Iran deal alive are “identical to what a Hillary Clinton administration would be saying, because that’s identical to what Barack Obama’s administration was saying.”
“This may sound like a technical point, a kind of legal quibble, but look: in fairness, if you’re a new administration you want to review the policy, you want to review your options. The last thing you do is say, ‘This deal is just going fine. Iran is in compliance and all is right with the world.’ You say, ‘Consistent with the evidence now and consistent with the facts, we’re not going to certify it one way or the other. We’re looking at it very carefully, and when we’re ready to tell you what our view is, we will,’” he advised, noting that the language of the Iran deal allows such a response to the mandatory 90-day reviews.
“I think this is another example, it’s a classic Washington play, of the bureaucracy trying to lock the president in,” he said. “Sure enough, just a day or two ago the New York Times had an editorial where it said now the president has already twice certified that Iran is in compliance with the deal – as if to say well, if we decide we’re going to junk the deal, abrogate it in the next few months, people are going to say, ‘But my goodness, what happened in the past 90 days? For six months we were happy with it!’”
Marlow asked for Bolton’s assessment of the State Department, an agency he described as historically unfriendly to the priorities of President Trump and his supporters.
“This is a real problem for the president, and for your listeners who may wonder why the government doesn’t do what the president says he wants it to do, it’s because the bureaucracy is like a big aircraft carrier. It proceeds on the course it’s been set, and it’s been set for eight years by the Obama administration. What is it doing today? It’s doing what it did yesterday. What will it do tomorrow? What it’s doing today – until somebody says turn this around and move it in another direction,” Bolton responded.
“One way you do that is to fill the bureaucracy with political appointees who understand they work for the president,” he continued. “That really has not happened at the State Department. The Defense Department is a little bit further ahead, but not by much, and the intelligence community, by and large, is still filled with only career people.”
“I think this problem exists to a lesser extent in the domestic bureaucracy, although you do have some excellent Cabinet secretaries there who are trying to do what they need to do,” he added. “The administration really needs to focus. It needs to concentrate on its policy agenda. I think everybody is frustrated by Congress’ failure to act. On Obamacare and other things, it’s hard for the president to herd all those cats together up on Capitol Hill.”
“We’ve had a first six months of the administration under Republican control of both houses of Congress, and it’s had its high points – the Gorsuch nomination and confirmation at the Supreme Court is a big one – but the record of accomplishment is not anything like what we wanted, and the international scene I think continues to worsen,” Bolton judged.
Iran is certainly a major element of that international scene, and Bolton had some advice on how to deal with it, beginning with withdrawal from the nuclear deal.
“I think withdrawing from the deal is key. I think you have a diplomatic campaign that alerts your friends, like Israel and Saudi Arabia and others, Britain and France, what you’re going to do. You lay out in a white paper all of Iran’s violations, all of its other objectionable conduct. You make the case why this deal is not in American national interests, or the interests of our friends and allies,” he said.
“You put it out there, you engage in an even broader diplomatic campaign, and you make it clear that the time is very limited that we will allow Iran to continue to pursue nuclear weapons. I’d make the same point, by the way, on North Korea. I think that’s where the president is. I think he sees these threats as urgent. The rest of the government needs to come along,” said Bolton.
John Bolton is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and head of his own political action committee, BoltonPAC.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.
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