A familiar pattern with regard to the Iran deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) has emerged over the past year.

First, a new wrinkle is discovered, one that’s invariably favorable to Iran.

Then, the administration denies that it is a wrinkle. The Republicans raise a fuss, and the media pesters the State Department.

The State Department then makes an unconvincing case that there is nothing there, and besides, it doesn’t matter. Hey, what did you guys want — war?!
Events transpired as such this week. Reuters reported:
The United States and its negotiating partners agreed “in secret” to allow Iran to evade some restrictions in last year’s landmark nuclear agreement in order to meet the deadline for it to start getting relief from economic sanctions, according to a think tank report published on Thursday.

The report, which was released by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, is based on information provided by several officials of governments involved in the negotiations.

The group’s president David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector and co-author of the report, declined to identify the officials, and Reuters could not independently verify the report’s assertions.
“The exemptions or loopholes are happening in secret, and it appears that they favor Iran,” Albright said.
This comes on top of the news about a shipment of $400 million in cold, hard cash that was, in effect, ransom — something the president expressly denied — to free several Americans detained by Iran.

With regard to the latest news, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), one of the deal’s most articulate and fierce critics, told Right Turn, “Deals made in the dark eventually come to the light. If accurate, this report follows the Obama Administration’s sad and predictable pattern of concession after concession to Iranian hardliners.”

He repeated what has now become apparent: “The claim that the deal puts a lid on Iran’s pathway to a nuclear weapon just isn’t true.”

The report referenced in the Reuters article from the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) stated that the United States and its partners gave Iran an exemption on the amount of enriched uranium it had on the very day the deal was implemented so as to bring Iran into compliance with the specific terms of the deal.

Until ISIS released the report and Reuters reported on it, the White House had not revealed this news, which heightens fears that the administration is entirely unserious about enforcing the terms of the deal, even one with as many explicit concessions (e.g. no anytime/anywhere inspections) as this one.

On Thursday afternoon, the press confronted State Department spokesman Adm. John Kirby, who ducked, deflected and denied the report. For a good half-hour, the press fenced with him. First, Kirby denied that there was any new, hidden cap on uranium, but then came up with a more restrictive definition that appeared nowhere in the deal — “usable uranium.” Reporters trapped him on the sleight of hand:
Opinions newsletter

Thought-provoking opinions and commentary, in your inbox daily.
MR KIRBY: I believe that this makes it very clear that the P5+1 is in agreement on all the commitments that Iran must make.
QUESTION: . . . [Y]ou’re using this term that’s not in the document. I’m just trying to figure out how we can actually check that or understand what it means. If you say some things are usable but some things aren’t, but I don’t know which are which, you don’t – you’re supposed to – that’s not spelled out in the document. That seems to be a new idea here.
MR KIRBY: It’s not a new idea. I don’t – look, I don’t know.
QUESTION: Okay, then show me where it is if it’s not a new – no.
MR KIRBY: I don’t. Brad, Brad, no, I’m not going to go through this with you at the press conference here on chapter and verse in here.
QUESTION: You don’t have to. He already did.
MR KIRBY: The point is – the point is that there is a limit of 300 kilograms of low-enriched uranium that can be further enriched for fissile material to produce a nuclear bomb. That’s the limit that they’re allowed to possess.
QUESTION: Well, that’s what —
MR KIRBY: They are – they have not —
QUESTION: That’s not the limit. He just read it out.
MR KIRBY: They have —
QUESTION: It doesn’t say that. You’ve just changed it again. It does not say that in the agreement. This sentence you just said does not exist in the JCPOA. You’ve just invented it.
MR KIRBY: I don’t know how to address it any further, Brad.
QUESTION: Well, think about it after the briefing.
QUESTION: For the joint commission —
MR KIRBY: No, I’m not going to think about it, Brad. I’ve answered the question as best as I can.
QUESTION: Well, you should.
The spokesman in essence deemed as not worthy of his time a legitimate question about the administration’s unwritten concession to Iran. Remarkable. Even worse, he denied that there were “exceptions” to the Iran deal, not addressing whether certain amounts of uranium had been “exempted.” It went like this:
QUESTION: Kirby, I’d just like to return to the exception/exemption issue. As James points out, every time he asks you about exemptions and whether or not the joint commission has issued any exemptions, you say there’s no loosening and they did not provide any exceptions. Can you tell us – well, not can you tell us. Did they provide any exemptions?
MR KIRBY: What I can tell you is the work of the joint commission is confidential and I’m not privy to it, as I shouldn’t be. And even if I was, I wouldn’t be at liberty to discuss it. What I can assure you of is the same thing I assured your colleague of, is that there’s been no loosening of the commitments and Iran has not and will not under the JCPOA be allowed to exceed the limits that are spelled out in the JCPOA.
QUESTION: So just for the last time, you’re not going to address the question of whether or not exemptions were issued?
MR KIRBY: I’m not going to address the work of the joint commission because I cannot address the work of the joint commission.
The next president needs to stop the stream of concessions, level with Congress about what was done and work cooperatively to pass new sanctions in response to Iran’s illegal missile tests, regional aggression and human rights violations. If the lame-duck Congress has not extended existing sanctions, that should be the first order of business in the new Congress.
 

 By: Jennifer Rubin

Jennifer Rubin writes the Right Turn blog for The Post, offering reported opinion from a conservative perspective.

Source, Washington Post, September 2