Donald Trump’s much-anticipated press conference to address his Iran peace deal didn’t last long on MS NOW, with host Alicia Menendez cutting in as he discussed the war before taking questions, with the president sounding both hoarse and out of breath.
Before taking questions, the president jumped from topic to topic about the attack on the Middle Eastern country as he was flanked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
With the president taking deep breaths after every sentence which were amplified by his microphone, he was telling the assembled reporters about burying Iran's nuclear program, saying, “Those mountains collapsed right on top of everything. Nobody's going to get that for a long time unless we want to get it. We will get it. But we're the only ones that can. And they say China has the equipment to get it, and we have the equipment.”
At that point the audio was cut and Menendez informed her audience, “A rambling, incoherent president of the United States attempting to take a victory lap over his page and a half Iran agreement. Let's bring in MS NOW Senior National Security Reporter David Rohde and former Undersecretary of State under President Barack Obama, Richard Stengel. So much to tease apart from what we have just heard from the president of the United States, let's start with a fact check on the way he described the JCPOA and how it compares to the agreement currently before him.”
“Well, Alicia, as you know, we haven't actually seen that agreement. We do know, supposedly that it's one and a half pages long,” Stengel observed. “The JCPOA agreement, which was negotiated over two years with a number of other countries that he's visiting now, England, France, Russia, was hundreds of pages long, and it was specifically about nuclear enrichment and the nuclear threat.”
“There are no kind of reflexive protections in the Trump agreement. And it's also just much broader. I mean, to get to the fact check, he talked about the $1.5 billion that was given to Iran after the signing of the JCPOA,” he elaborated. “That was Iran's money. That was interest on the money that was in the United States that Iran had deposited here. Again, it's been reported that this will be a $300 billion fund that Iran will be able to access, as well as a relaxation of the sanctions against Iran, which gives them billions and billions of dollars. So, as you say, it's incredibly inarticulate and 100% wrong over and over.”
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