Scott Horton: evaluation

Transcript context

…That is a red line. He will move off. Yes. And then the thing is too, just like I was saying before, if Trump had come in 2017 and said, “Screw this, I hate this deal.” And then got on a plane and flown straight to Tehran and said, or sent his guys and said, “Now listen here Ayatollah, I want to fix this deal up better. ” I think that he really could have, and I already said, I don’t know the details, but I believe Mark when he says that the Europeans were being intransigent on that. And again, I criticized the CIA and FBI for framing Trump for treason, for preventing him from being able to work with the Russians to see if maybe they could put pressure on the Ayatollah to deal with him. But I think that it’s clear, when the Ayatollah was willing in the JCPOA to, well, first of all, to sign the additional protocol back in the W. Bush years, for three years, he didn’t enrich anything under that deal as long as he was negotiating with the E3 and then under the JCPOA where he’s shipping out every bit of his declared nuclear material, he’s clearly keeping the ability to enrich if necessary to weapons grade if a crisis breaks out and he feels like he has to make nukes. But he had no stockpile to enrich this whole thing about 99% of the way there. He had no stockpile. So even if you count gassing up your truck on the way to the mine as part of this long timescale of percentages here, they were much further from a nuke under the deal, which he agrees we shouldn’t have even gotten out of. Can I just say technically, just I think, again, important for your listeners trying understand, under the JCPOA, Iran is allowed to keep a stockpile of a maximum of 300 kilograms, as I remember, of 3.67% enriched material. They’re allowed to continue to enrich as long as if they go over the 300 kilogram, they have to continue to send that out to Russian, to Russia to blend down. And so they kept the enrichment capability, the ability to enrich. They did keep a stockpile. Scott’s right. They’re not allowed in those early years to go under 3.67%. They would be allowed to go to 20% and 60% and 90% as the restrictions sunsetted, but they were able to keep all of those key capabilities. So I just want to clarify just technically what the JCPOA actually said and what it didn’t say.…

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