MSNBC MSNBC Live with Yasmin Vossoughian September 20, 2020 19:22:45 archive.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from archive.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
hill. jake, is this a pure party line divide? this is the legacy of the obama administration, our last democratic president. i know when this deal went through there was some hesitation from some democrats. there will be some but i think a lot of people, given the distance, will agree basically what the israeli intelligence folks think about this deal, which on the hole it is working and on the whole it does give the u.s. a window into the iranian nuclear program. i imagine now democrats will be lockstep behind the agreement. though on this issue, congress is somewhat irrelevant. because as you remember, the vote to pass or approve of this deal was largely perfunctory and congress didn t ratify it as it would a normal treaty. this was just a couple months
memories of the flare-up with that scene in the rose garden. thank you all for joining us on a very busy afternoon. now to our national security experts, jeremy bash, former chief of staff at cia and defense department. joe cerencione. isaac stone fish from the center of u.s.-china relations. starting with you, jeremy. what we just heard from netanyahu, the israeli prime minister, with a we heard from trump in this press conference. what do you make of it? we ve known for a long time iran had a nuclear weapons program before 2003. they shut the program down. we ve known that for about ten years so that s not new information. the question is did prime minister netanyahu show in the files that his israeli intelligence very impressive got from tehran, did he show new evidence that post the iran deal that the iranian regime has been engaged in weaponization. i didn t see it. what i saw was that the individual who ran iran s
nuclear weapons program before is still employed by the government. he s still engaged in dual-use technology development and basically they ve not destroyed the files and know-how they once had so they can restart the program. but i don t see a smoking gun that shows the iranian deal has been violated. this was about 20 minutes before the trump press conference we just showed. the timing. the intended audience. the strategy behind this from a netanyahu perspective? well, this is clearly an effort to nudge not just the united states, who i think they believe is on their side on this issue, but in fact the other major world powers, including the europeans and probably the russians and the chinese, that in fact iran is not living up to the spirit of the deal, that they are engaged in nefarious activities all around the world, that they re building ballistic missile program. and iran s claiming that they have not had a real nuclear weapons program, that that was a lie. they are really
too eager to do that. what is the mood, both the republican and democratic side on capitol hill, when it comes to the future of this iran deal? republicans have wanted this scrapped since it was signed. they didn t want the president to sign it, president obama that is, to sign it in the first place. what you are seeing at the white house and frankly what you see in tel aviv today is a pretty close reflection for where many members of congress are and frankly, as we kind of approach the deadline to pull out of this, netanyahu did a great political thing for the president in that he set the ground work, he laid the groundwork for president trump to be able to pull out of this deal. though andrea is right, there is no indication. and i watched that presentation that netanyahu made. there is no indication that they believe they still have a weapons program. so that s not entirely clear. but almost uniformly on capitol hill, republicans would be extraordinarily happy to scrap this deal a