RUTHFULLY YOURS

Deal or no deal?

As Fox News Channel business commentator John Layfield recently suggested, I googled a November 19 State Department letter to U.S. Representative Mike Pompeo (R., Kans.). And then, as happens too often these days, my jaw dropped.

Referring to Obama’s vaunted Iran-nuke deal, Julia Frifield, assistant secretary for legislative affairs, wrote: “The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document.”

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

So atop its multifarious pitfalls and Trojan horses, the Iran nuke deal is not even signed.

No American adult would buy a used Chevy without securing a signed contract from the car salesman. And yet Obama — the all-wise alumnus of Columbia University and Harvard Law School — rests the future of Iran’s atomic-bomb program on a sheet of paper that is not even signed?

Iran did not fail to sign the ObamaNuke deal because someone forgot to hand some mullah a pen. This was a deliberate act of omission.

“If the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is sent to [and passed by] parliament, it will create an obligation for the government. It will mean the president, who has not signed it so far, will have to sign it,” Iranian president Hassan Rouhani said last August, as NRO’s Joel Gehrke recently noted. “Why should we place an unnecessary legal restriction on the Iranian people?”

No problem, Assistant Secretary Frifield insists: “The JCPOA reflects political commitments between Iran, P5+1 (the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China) and the European Union.”

Ah! What could be more reliable than political commitments? So America is trusting the ayatollahs to spurn nuclear weapons based on unsigned political commitments that are as stalwart as: “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. Period.” Or: “Read my lips: No new taxes.”

How reassuring.

Frifield adds these comforting words: “The success of the JCPOA will depend not on whether it is legally binding or signed, but rather on the extensive verification measures we have put in place.”

Yes, these include “the extensive verification measures” at Iranian military bases, all of which are totally off-limits to international weapons inspectors. And why would anyone look for weapons at military bases? Obama’s rigorous verification techniques include letting Iran self-inspect its facilities at Parchin. Also, when inspectors identify a suspicious site, Iran may slap them with a waiting period of between 24 and 78 days. During that time, they will be free to inspect their hotel mini bars. Many nasty things that glow in the dark can be covered up or whisked away during this three-and-a-half-week to two-and-a-half-month total eclipse of the sons of Ayatollah Khomeini.

“Unsigned, this agreement is nothing more than a press release and just about as enforceable,” Representative Pompeo remarked after receiving State’s letter. “Further, it fails to address to whom Americans should look to uphold this agreement once the Ayatollah dies, or to whom the Iranians must turn once President Obama passes from the stage. Placing our trust in the ability of these nuclear weapon-driven, radical extremists will not ease tensions, but will only get Americans killed.”

Along with Pompeo, Representative Lee Zeldin (R., N.Y.) is one of the House’s most vocal and effective leaders against the ObamaNuke catastrophe. He also is unimpressed with State’s revelations.

“If there is no signature, there is no deal,” Zeldin tells me.

This is just another piece of evidence that there really is no deal between the United States and Iran. Just last week, senior U.S. officials confirmed that Iran has already violated two UN resolutions when they carried out a medium-range ballistic missile test. It’s clear Iran will not abide by the JCPOA.

Zeldin listed a few of his least favorite things about Obama’s new partners in “peace.”

Iran is the largest state sponsor of terrorism, actively working to overthrow foreign governments, while pledging to wipe Israel off the map and chanting “Death to America” in their streets. So much wasn’t even part of the negotiations, including Iran’s continued efforts to develop ICBMs, blow up mock U.S. warships, and unjustly imprison American citizens — including a U.S. Marine, a pastor, and a reporter. This is a fatally flawed deal that paves the path to worsening instability and turmoil in the Middle East and is on track to trigger a nuclear arms race in the region.

If possible, Frank Gaffney hates the ObamaNuke deal even more than Pompeo and Zeldin do. The president of the Center for Security Policy told me that this is “the most egregious act of official malfeasance and treasonous misconduct I have witnessed in my 40 years of practicing and monitoring security policy-making.” Gaffney added:

Simply put, President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and their apologists have perpetrated national-security fraud with their abject appeasement of the Iranian mullahs, their misrepresentations to the Congress and the American people about the results of the negotiations with Iran, and the administration’s belated admission that, in fact, there is no deal with Iran.

The ObamaNuke “deal” is an even bigger disaster than it was when Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) grossly mismanaged last September’s effort to strangle it in the upper house. He can redeem himself by asking House speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) to amend the current omnibus budget bill to bar Obama from spending any taxpayer funds on implementing this calamitous “deal.”

Congress most urgently must stop Obama from transmitting to Tehran some $150 billion in frozen assets that the atomic ayatollahs would be free to plow into global terrorism, anti-Israel carnage, and attacks on “the Great Satan.” Translation: You and me.

— Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University.