Even as Iran’s supreme leader suggested another hurdle to a nuclear deal Thursday, President Barack Obama and his administration waged an aggressive coordinated campaign to stop Congress from interfering.
Making his first public comments on the deal, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the deal would be signed in late June only if economic sanctions are lifted at once – not in phases as the Obama administration insists.
“This is a very crucial point that on the day of nuclear deal all sanctions be removed,” he said.
Obama did not acknowledge the remarks out of Tehran as he spoke in Jamaica, but he said he was confident that the framework would ensure that Iran didn’t obtain nuclear weapons, keeping his focus at least publicly on selling the pact in the U.S.
“This is not done until it’s done,” Obama said in Kingston after a meeting with Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller. “The next two to three months in negotiations are going to be absolutely critical for making sure that we are memorializing an agreement that gives us confidence and gives the world confidence that Iran, in fact, is not pursuing a nuclear weapon.”
Before negotiations with international partners and Iran resume, however, the administration faces an equally critical deadline as it works to persuade skeptical members of Congress that proposed congressional intervention could jeopardize the deal.
Lawmakers will return to Washington next week after a two-week recess, and they’re scheduled to take up legislation that gives them a say and would require Obama to give them 60 days to review the Iran deal, blocking the White House from immediately easing congressional sanctions imposed on the Tehran government.
The White House is waging an across-the-administration push to convince Congress to scrap the measure, and threatening to veto it should it pass anyway.
Wendy Sherman, the undersecretary of state for political affairs and Obama’s lead Iran negotiator, offered a classified briefing to members of Congress on Thursday, though it was unclear whether any attended.
Jewish groups, including several that had been sharply critical of the measure, were invited to a meeting Wednesday with Secretary of State John Kerry. Kerry also plans to personally lobby lawmakers next week.
“This deal has emerged as the centerpiece of the president’s foreign policy,” said William Galston, a former policy adviser to then-President Bill Clinton who’s a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “The president is all in on this one. This is his.”
Aides have described the deal as a personal victory for Obama, and Galston said it represented “the culmination of the ‘against the grain’ vision of diplomatic negotiations that he put on the table as far back as the primary in 2008.”
To make the sell, Obama has pitched the tentative agreement in his weekly radio and Web address and in news interviews.
He’s called the four congressional leaders, and he spoke Wednesday with Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., the influential chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a co-author of the legislation. Corker’s office said his legislation would apply only to congressional sanctions, not sanctions imposed by the United Nations or by presidential executive action.
“The president made the case to him once again that the president believes that this principled approach to diplomacy is the best way for us to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said.
The White House sales pitch appeared to be making some progress, with Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., filing an amendment that would remove a provision from the bill requiring Iran to renounce terrorism. The White House says the agreement was solely focused on Iran’s nuclear program.
And Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., wrote to Corker, asking him to delay a committee vote until a final agreement with Iran is reached.
“To force Congress to weigh in now on the Iran nuclear talks before a final deal has been completed would be a reckless rush to judgment,” Boxer wrote, adding it could “derail a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to deal with this looming threat.”
The administration’s push has been aided by liberal groups, including MoveOn.org, which is calling Senate Democrats who have yet to sign on to the Corker bill.
“We have conveyed to White House officials, as we have to members of Congress, that supporting diplomacy with Iran is a top priority for progressives,” said Jo Comerford, the group’s campaign director.
White House officials describe an administration-wide effort.
In addition to Obama, top aides and advisers are calling Congress, including White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, Kerry and others, according to National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan.
Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes has appeared on Israeli television, briefed foreign reporters in Washington and appeared on the Sunday talk shows. Moniz, a nuclear physicist who played a key role in the negotiations in Switzerland, also made the Sunday show rounds and briefed reporters at the White House.
The White House is targeting the public with a page on its website that outlines a deal it says will “verifiably prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and ensure that Iran’s nuclear program will be exclusively peaceful going forward.”
It’s also used the White House Twitter account – 6 million followers – to make its case, seemingly mocking one of its most influential critics, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, by tweeting a graphic of a cartoon bomb that bore a striking resemblance to the drawing he used while warning about Iran’s nuclear program at the United Nations in September 2012.
Where Netanyahu’s graphic showed Iran close to nuclear-weapon capacity, the White House version features a pair of cartoon scissors snipping the fuse.