Report: U.S. Granted Iran Secret Nuclear Exemptions

Eight months after President Obama triumphantly signed the Iranian nuclear deal into existence, the truth is all coming out. First, we learned about the $400 million ransom payment that was certainly NOT a ransom payment. Then, oops, we learned that it actually was a ransom payment, but that it didn’t really “count” since the money was owed to Tehran.

And now we’re learning that the deal we were publicly sold is not the deal that’s actually in place.

According to the Institute for Science and International Security, there are clauses in the deal that undermine efforts to keep Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

David Albright, the president of the Institute and a former UN inspector, told Reuters that “exemptions or loopholes are happening in secret, and it appears that they favor Iran.”

The report, developed through interviews with officials who participated in the negotiations, contends that the U.S. and its partners agreed to turn their heads on a number of issues in order to meet the January 16 deadline.

“Among the exemptions were two that allowed Iran to exceed the deal’s limits on how much low-enriched uranium (LEU) it can keep in its nuclear facilities,” reported Reuters. “LEU can be purified into highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium.”

Under the (supposed) terms of the nuclear deal, Iran is only permitted to stockpile 300 kg of 3.5 percent LEU. The report claims that the P5+1 joint commission overlooked this requirement, permitting Iran to store “unknown amounts” of the material.

The joint commission also granted Iran permission to continue operating 19 radiation containment chambers that were larger than those permitted by the deal itself. These chambers are not necessarily nefarious, but they can be used to separate plutonium, another fuel used in the development of nuclear weapons.

The White House denies the allegations.

“Iran completed all of the steps required to get to Implementation Day under the JCPOA, as verified by the IAEA,” a senior administration official told Fox News. “Any assertion to the contrary is completely false, including any assertion that we moved forward with Implementation Day before Iran met all of its nuclear-related commitments.”

If the report is true, though, Congress was informed of the secret clauses on January 16. By then, it was too late to do anything about them.

Reuters isn’t vouching for the veracity of the report, but Albright didn’t just invent this stuff out of whole cloth.

We’d give Obama the benefit of the doubt, but…