President Donald Trump on Wednesday touted what he called a “historic” agreement with Iran while joking that if the deal falters he will pin the blame on Vice President J.D. Vance.
Speaking at a press conference at the end of the G7 summit in France, Trump defended the memorandum of understanding with Tehran, saying it would end the current conflict, reopen the Strait of Hormuz and “prevent Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon.”
But when asked why he wouldn’t stick around Europe for a signing ceremony set for Friday in Switzerland, the president quipped that he was letting the vice president go in his stead in case the deal goes south.
“This way, if it works out, I’m going to take the credit. If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD,” Trump said,
Citing no evidence, Trump repeatedly attempted to frame the accord as tougher and more effective than the Obama-era JCPOA, which he again denounced as a “road to a nuclear weapon.”
He said the new understanding makes clear that Iran will “neither produce nor procure” a nuclear weapon and warned that if Tehran violates the terms, the United States will resume military strikes.
Trump also falsely suggested that the agreement does not provide Iran with any funds while confusing the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran, the U.S. and the other four permanent U.N. Security Council members with a separate settlement the Obama administration had reached with Iran over a decades-long dispute regarding a refund for military equipment that was purchased by the pre-Islamic Republic government and never delivered.
That settlement had nothing to do with the 2015 deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, but Trump nonetheless continued making false statements to the effect that Obama had somehow loaded “a plane with $1,700,000,000 in green cash from banks all over Washington, Maryland, and Virginia” and used it to pay Iranian leaders in exchange for participating in negotiations.
“It all went into a Boeing 757 a wonderful plane, and they flew it to Iran, and they gave it out to people. They bribed people, they thought they were going to get it done. Then they gave billions and billions of dollars after that, and they got a deal that was a road to a nuclear weapon,” he said.
“They were going to take out the entire Middle East, including Israel, and if they had a nuclear weapon, they would have used it with it within moments after getting it, so I made it very tough for them when I terminated the Barack Hussein Obama catastrophe JCPOA.”
He later added that the previous agreement was “really dangerous” because it “gave them everything, including a lot of money.”
But a U.S. official who read the text of the agreement to reporters in a conference call confirmed that Trump’s deal does, in fact, give Tehran access to multiple potential sources of cash.
Not only does it include a promise for Washington to “undertake with regional partners to develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least USD 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” it also provides for the United States to “terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the United Nations Security Council resolutions, IAEA Board of Governors resolutions, and all unilateral U.S. sanctions, primary and secondary.”
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