Kerry: US version of Iran deal is ‘reliable and accurate’

WASHINGTON — Two days before voting is slated to begin on a bill that could deal the Obama administration a key defeat in the domestic battle over nuclear negotiations with Iran, US Secretary of State John Kerry defended his understandings on the outcome of talks with Iran as “reliable and accurate.”

A US fact sheet was released 10 days ago, when the P5+1 member states and Iran agreed to a framework for a long-term deal, but Iranian leaders have refuted a number of the understandings listed in the document.

Asked on Sunday by ABC’s George Stephanopolous whether there is “a deal” regarding when sanctions will be lifted, Kerry responded that “the facts on which the parameters are based are facts,” adding for emphasis that “yesterday, the Russians issued a statement saying that the fact sheet or the facts as expressed by the United States are reliable and accurate information.”

On Thursday, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei downplayed the recent deal, saying that “everything done so far neither guarantees an agreement in principle nor its contents, nor does it guarantee that the negotiations will continue to the end.”

“The whole problem comes now that the details should be discussed, because the other side is stubborn, difficult to deal with, breaks promises and is a backstabber,” Khamenei said, arguing that Iran had never agreed to inspections of non-nuclear military facilities and demanding that all sanctions be immediately lifted as soon as a final deal is reached.

The US has repeatedly insisted that sanctions will only be lifted in a gradual process.

The secretary of state emphasized that he will “stand by every fact that I have said — stated publicly.”

Tehran, he said, “likewise put out a different set of interpretations” when the an earlier, interim nuclear deal was agreed in 2013. “But when it came time to implement the agreement, the agreement that was implemented was the agreement that we had articulated and it was the agreement that has been kept.”

Kerry noted that “to Iran’s credit, Iran has lived up to and lived by every requirement in that agreement.”

Kerry will brief both houses of Congress on the understandings reached two weeks ago in Lausanne, Switzerland, between Iran and the P5+1 member states. Speaking Sunday, he said that he “will lay out in full our understanding of this agreement.” Regarding the dueling Iranian claims about several key aspects of the deal, Kerry added that “if it isn’t the understanding, we’re not going to sign an agreement.”

In order for a “full agreement to be put in place,” Kerry said, negotiators will have to “finish in a few areas that were clearly left unresolved.” The secretary of state did not, however, specify which areas those were.

In an interview with The Times of Israel last week, Olli Heinonen, a former deputy director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that from technical point of view, there was more work ahead of negotiators to close gaps in the coming two months than had been agreed upon in the past eighteen months of talks.

Kerry’s latest trip to Capitol Hill comes at a critical time for the administration. On Tuesday, the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee is scheduled to begin voting on a bill that administration officials have warned could undermine future rounds of talks.

Speaking on CBS’s “Face the Nation” as part of his Sunday talk show blitz, Kerry asserted that the administration had “earned the right to be able to try and complete this without interference and certainly without partisan politics.”

The bill’s original sponsors, senators Bob Corker (R-TN) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ), insist that the legislation only seeks to empower Congress to exercise oversight over any final agreement that is reached with Iran by the June 30 deadline. The bill’s opponents complain, however, that it contains “poison pill” clauses that seek to derail talks altogether. More than 50 amendments have been added to the legislation, including a demand that Iran recognize the State of Israel as a precondition for sanctions relief.

US President Barack Obama has promised to veto the legislation, although a number of Democrats are said to be working on compromise plans that would satisfy bipartisan demands for Congress to weigh in on the deal in ways that the administration could accept.

In the meantime, Corker is only a few votes away from securing a veto-overriding majority of two-thirds of the Senate.

Kerry did not respond directly to comments made by one of the nuclear deal’s most vocal opponents in the Senate, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who accused Kerry of trying “to come back and sell a bill of goods, hoping maybe that the Iranians wouldn’t say much about it.”

“I think President Obama spoke very, very powerfully to Senator McCain yesterday, and I’ll let the president’s words stand,” Kerry told Stephanopolous.