US ‘fleeced’ in Iran deal, Corker tells Kerry

Republican Senator Bob Corker accuses Secretary of State John Kerry of allowing the United States to be “fleeced” by Iran during the negotiations on the nuclear deal agreed last week.

“I believe we’ve been fleeced and in the course of being fleeced you turned Iran from being a pariah into Congress being a pariah,” Corker says at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the agreement.

“A few weeks ago, you said that no deal was better than a bad deal,” he adds. “What you say now is that somehow if Congress were to turn this down, the only option is war.”

Corker also targets the administration’s attitude toward Israel and the Gulf states, about whom he says Kerry speaks “with a degree of disdain.”

He tells Kerry: “I believe that you have crossed a new threshold in US foreign policy where it is now the policy of the United States to allow a state sponsor of terror to develop a sophisticated nuclear program.”

— Rebecca Shimoni Stoil