The US State Department must give Congress a copy of the Iran nuclear agreement that includes the formal signatures of the seven nations involved in the talks, a Republican critic of the deal demands.
Without those signatures, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) told Secretary of State John Kerry, Congress cannot be assured that every country has agreed to the terms of the deal.
“This is not a mere formality,” Pompeo wrote. “Those signatures represent the commitment of the signatory and the country on whose behalf he or she is signing.”
“In short, just as with any legal instrument, signing matters.”
Though the Obama administration sent a copy of the nuclear agreement to Congress shortly after it was sealed earlier this summer, it was never stamped with the signatures of negotiators from the U.S., Iran and the five other nations involved, Pompeo said.
“Having never seen an international agreement of this magnitude not signed by the parties or an agent of the parties, I assume this is simply an oversight or an administrative error,” he wrote to Kerry.
Pompeo has been outspoken about his opposition to the deal and has helped rally Republicans around the notion that the Obama administration has violated the law by failing to give lawmakers the text of side agreements involving the International Atomic Energy Agency to which the U.S. was not a party. The agreements detail international inspectors’ access to some Iranian facilities.