President Joe Biden’s nominee for ambassador to Israel has come under fire from GOP senators who grilled him Wednesday over his role in developing the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran.
Jack Lew, the former Treasury secretary, was one who helped craft the Iran Nuclear Deal agreed upon in 2015 when Biden was vice president. Lew was also questioned in 2016 after he played a role in the Obama administration’s handout of $400 million in cash to Tehran. His confirmation process started on Wednesday, less than two weeks after Iran-backed Hamas terrorists attacked Israel.
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lambasted the deal back in July 2015, warning that it would “reward Iran, the terrorist regime in Tehran, with hundreds of billions of dollars” over the coming decade.
“This cash bonanza will fuel Iran’s terrorism worldwide, its aggression in the region and its efforts to destroy Israel, which are ongoing,” Netanyahu said at the time.
This terrible deal gave Iran access to over $100 billion in oil revenues that were previously frozen by U.S. sanctions. It also allowed Iran to produce an unlimited amount of enriched uranium after 2031 and lifted restrictions on energy sales. And to add insult to world injury, the Obama administration secretly sent a planeload of $400 million in cash directly to Tehran, which Lew helped organize.
Former President Donald Trump got out of the dangerous deal in 2018. Trump had sought to restrict Iran’s missile program and push the Tehran regime to sever its ties to terrorism, but Iran refused to negotiate.
But as soon as Biden got into the White House, he began working out a new Iran Nuclear Deal, and last month Biden unfroze $6 billion for Iran in a prisoner exchange deal.
“Jack Lew is simply not the right person to be America’s ambassador to our longtime and strong ally, Israel,” Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) said in a statement. “Lew was the architect of the failed and dangerous Iran Nuclear Deal. Iran is the world’s number one state-sponsor of terrorism and the primary funder of Hamas terrorism – we don’t need a soft-on-Iran ambassador to Israel. Biden and Lew both have capitulated to Iran in the past – this fact alone should immediately disqualify him.”
Look at what Sen. Ted Cruz had to say about Lew:
This week I met privately with Jack Lew, Biden’s nominee to be the Ambassador to Israel. Yesterday I questioned him publicly.
He had said that “nobody could have imagined” what happened in Israel with the terrorist attack.
That’s false: Many of us not only imagined it, we… pic.twitter.com/XTMJy6dTm6
— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) October 19, 2023
