Ben Rhodes, a former top aide to President Barack Obama, repeatedly dodged questions from CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Friday about a new report claiming his administration misled Congress about granting Iran access to the U.S. financial system during the negotiation of the Iranian nuclear deal.
On Wednesday, Senate Republicans released a report claiming that the Obama administration secretly granted Iran a license “that authorized a conversion of Iranian assets worth billions of U.S. dollars using the U.S. financial system,” despite administration officials testifying before Congress that granting Iran access to the U.S. financial system was never on the table as a negotiating tool.
The former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications tried to shoot down the idea the administration misled Congress by telling Blitzer that it was only a “single license granted” that was “never even used.”
Rhodes added that it doesn’t really matter how the administration operated, as Republicans “got what they wanted. They tore up the Iran deal.”
“Instead of actually putting forward a policy for nuclear weapons going forward, they are investigating things in a partisan way that happened years ago,” he stated. “And frankly what is more concerning to me is the fact that a few days ago the supreme leader of Iran said they’re going to resume the nuclear enrichment activities. That is what we should be worried about here.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, gave a slightly different reaction to the report.
“The Obama Iran nuclear deal was a devil’s bargain, but one exclusively designed to help the devil,” Cruz said in a statement responding to Wednesday’s report. “The Obama administration was even working in secret to circumvent the weaker sanctions left over from the nuclear deal – and they were lying to Congress about it.”
“They subordinated American law and the U.S. financial system to the deal, hatching a scheme that would have put the U.S. dollar and U.S. banks to work moving money for the Iranians,” he added, before calling for an investigation to “get to the bottom of whatever else the Obama administration sacrificed at the altar of the Iran deal.”
