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Trump Administration Officials Reveal Why US Lost Faith in Diplomacy With Iran

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Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell / @TheElizMitchell

Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell is the White House Correspondent for "The Daily Signal." Send her an email.

Senior Trump administration officials said Iran attempted to prolong nuclear talks and deceived the United States about the use of its research reactor, leading negotiators to determine the Islamic state was not acting in good faith.

In a call with reporters on Tuesday, an administration official said that Iran had attempted to drag out negotiations over its nuclear program and delayed the Americans’ request for a detailed proposal, before the U.S. decided to act with Israel and strike Iranian military and political targets this weekend.

During several rounds of talks between representatives of the two countries, Iran had maintained it did not intend to build a nuclear weapon, but it had enriched uranium far beyond the level needed for civilian energy use and close to the level needed for a bomb, Reuters reported.

Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi, one of the diplomats involved in the talks, told CBS News last week following the third round of talks that the Iranians were willing to minimize enrichment, forgo stockpiling nuclear material, and allow IAEA inspections.

However, the administration said it learned that Iranians were hiding their nuclear enrichment program underground. The regime claimed it used its Tehran Research Reactor for civil purposes, but negotiators determined Iran was stockpiling fuel to later use to create a weapon.

“The claim that they were using a research reactor to do good for the Iranian people was a complete and false pretense to hide the fact that they were stockpiling there,” an official said.

“If it’s really about building radio isotopes and creating medicines for their people and doing all this good stuff that they profess to be doing, then why wouldn’t they take the fuel from us when we offered it to them?” an official asked

The U.S. offered the Iranians free nuclear fuel to use for their civilian nuclear program, but Iranians declined, saying enrichment is a national, “inalienable” right, an administration official said Tuesday.

“We said to them that you may deem that to be your right,” the official said. “We deem our right the ability to stop that, and we’re going to stop it, and we’re not going to allow it.”

Negotiators demanded that the Iranians have their facility above ground, and the Iranians shot back that it could then be bombed.

“If there’s nothing nefarious being done there, then, then you shouldn’t be worried about a bomb,” an official said. “So it was one of these things where just everything was just trying to create a construct that would give them the capabilities and materials they needed into the future to produce nuclear weapons.”

“It was very clear as a negotiator, what they were trying to do was to get us into a long, drawn out process with meetings and experts and something that would have taken time in order to do the third meeting,” one official said.

The Iranians presented a five-page proposal in the third meeting, but it was “like Swiss cheese because there were a lot of holes that they were able to go through,” an official said.

“They also gave us their needs for the next 10 years, and that was the first time that we were able to see what they plan to do with the different materials that they claim they wanted to produce,” the official continued.

There was no short-term deal that would have been beneficial for the U.S. and the world, an official said.

“It was very clear they were just trying to buy time in order to preserve whatever they could, to get past the term of President Trump, in order to get to a nuclear weapon,” the official said, “and if they wanted to do a peaceful nuclear program, or kind of a real deal, we offered them many ample opportunities to do that, and they kept getting in their own way, probably intentionally, in order not to do that.”

According to a senior official, the Iranians are “clever people” who are motivated entirely by “consummat[ing] and bring[ing] to fruition the enrichment process.”

It was the role of the negotiators to determine if a deal could be made. They came back and reported to the president that Iran was “basically playing games,” so a deal would be difficult.

“We said, look, if you decide that you want to do diplomacy, we’ll push as hard as possible,” a senior official said. “We’ll get in a room. We’ll fight for every point that we can. But these guys, they just really were showing that, that they that they didn’t want to, that they weren’t willing to make the type of deal that President Trump would have been satisfied with.”

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