Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Wednesday that President Joe Biden “wants to resurrect the Obama Iran policy,” which provided a pathway for the Iranian regime to build nuclear weapons after roughly a decade.
DeSantis appeared on the Mark Levin Show with conservative host and litigator Mark Levin. He was asked about the Biden administration’s ongoing effort to marginalize the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom Biden refuses to meet despite the fact that he was elected more than half a year ago.
Earlier this week, DeSantis criticized outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides for defending the Biden administration’s interference in Israel’s deeply contentious domestic political debate over judicial reform:
How disrespectful for the U.S. Ambassador to Israel to falsely claim “most Israelis want the United States to be in their business.”
Biden meets with dictators of countries such as Venezuela but snubs the democratically elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This is…
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) July 12, 2023
Levin asked DeSantis why the Biden administration felt it necessary to attack Israel’s democratically-elected government rather than standing in solidarity with it against common threats such as Iran.
DeSantis said:
It’s just outrageous. I mean, it’s all political. You know, they don’t like Bibi, quite frankly, because he’s a conservative. They’re wading into internal Israeli matters, like the judicial reform, totally inappropriate for us to be sticking our beak into that. This is a first rate, very smart people in that country. They can figure that out. And so, this is part and parcel — at the end of the day, Biden wants to resurrect the Obama Iran policy. He wants to empower Iran. And they think that that’s good policy. And it’s not. And so, we should be turning the screws on the Iranians, turning the screws on that regime. When Obama did the Iran deal, they used that money exactly as people like you and I predicted. They used it to fund terrorism throughout the Middle East. And that’s their number one goal. And I think in terms of how crazy the regime is — they would absolutely, if they thought they could get away with it, launch a nuclear attack on Israel, even knowing they could face a reprisal because they would think that that’s worth it. So it’s a very dangerous regime. And we should be doing all we can to deny them the ability to have a nuclear weapon.
Obama’s Iran deal, which was reached in 2015, circumvented the Senate and dropped sanctions on Iran, adding billions of dollars in cash and unfrozen assets in return for promises by Iran to slow its enrichment of uranium.
Netanyahu, who opposed the deal, noted that it did not address Iran’s support for terrorism around the world, and that it put Iran on a path to become a nuclear power after various restrictions in the deal expired. In April 2018, he dramatically revealed intelligence files that showed Iran had not complied with the deal and had never given up its ambitions to develop nuclear weapons.
Biden has tried to negotiate a new deal since taking office.
Recent news reports have suggested that Biden is near a “mini-deal” with Iran that would allow the regime to enrich uranium just short of the level necessary to build a nuclear weapon. Work on the deal has proceeded despite the fact that Biden’s envoy for Iran negotiations, Rob Malley, has been suspended on suspicion of mishandling classified information.
Ha’aretz, Israel’s left-wing daily, has reported that a new, unwritten Iran deal is already in effect, and the only concern for the Biden administration is that Israel might interfere with it.
Then-President Donald Trump left the Iran deal in 2018, calling it one-sided and dangerous for the U.S. DeSantis joined a congressional delegation to the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem several days later.
DeSantis also commented on the politicization of the FBI, saying it had become even worse under CHristopher Wray than it had been under James Comey, who protected Hillary Clinton from prosecution while promoting the “Rossia collusion” hoax against Donald Trump. “I don’t even think under Comey the FBI was working with Big Tech to censor dissent and to stifle speech,” DeSantis said. “They did do that under Christopher Wray.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.