President Donald Trump revealed during Wednesday night’s Iran address that one of his top achievements against Iran, which he described as spanning across both his terms, was shredding former President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal.
Trump described the efforts in the Middle East as making “tremendous progress” and called Operation Epic Fury “necessary for the safety of America and the security of the free world.”
Meanwhile, he slammed Iran as “fanatical,” “murderous” and “thuggish,” arguing that letting them have a nuclear weapon “would be an intolerable threat.” While slamming Obama’s 2015 deal, the president cited the $400 million cash payment the former president’s administration flew to Iran in an effort to “buy their respect and loyalty.”
“The most violent and thuggish regime on Earth would be free to carry out their campaigns of terror, coercion, conquest and mass murder from behind a nuclear shield. I will never let that happen, and neither should any of our past presidents,” Trump said, leading into his comments about Obama’s “terrible” deal with Iran.
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“I did many things during my two terms in office to stop the quest for nuclear weapons by Iran. First, and perhaps most importantly, I killed Gen. Qasem Soleimani in my first term. He was an evil genius, brilliant person, a horrible human being. The father of the roadside bomb,” Trump continued. “And then, very importantly, I terminated Barack Hussein Obama’s Iran nuclear deal. A disaster. Obama gave them $1.7 billion in cash – green, green cash. Took it out of banks from Virginia, D.C. and Maryland. All the cash they had.”
Trump slammed Obama’s administration for using airplanes to transport that cash, around $400 million, in January 2016, which Trump said was done “to buy their respect and loyalty.”
“But it didn’t work,” Trump continued. “They laughed at our president and went on with their mission to have a nuclear bomb. His Iran deal would have led to a colossal arsenal of massive nuclear weapons for Iran, and they would have had them years ago, and they would have used them – would have been a different world. There would have been no Middle East and no Israel right now, in my opinion… Had I not terminated that terrible deal – I was so honored to do it. I was so proud to do it. It was so bad right from the beginning.”
Trump added that he is currently “correcting” the “mistakes” of former presidents, like Obama, noting he has been willing to do what they have not.
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Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), exchanged sanctions relief to Iran for certain limits and international monitoring of Iran’s nuclear program, which the administration said would push Tehran further from a bomb, a take that has been contested by critics, including Trump.
Critics argued the effort actually empowered Iran, pointing in part to the Wall Street Journal reporting that the U.S. secretly airlifted $400 million in cash to Tehran that coincided with the release of four American prisoners.
The Obama administration maintained that the payment was not part of the nuclear pact itself, but that it was the first installment of a separate settlement stemming from a decades-old pre-revolution arms dispute.