CNN “fact checks” Trump on Corker and the Iran deal, gets it WRONG

CNN wrote an entire article here calling out the president for being ‘wrong’ in his comments about Corker and the Iran deal.

The title of their piece is Fact check: Trump’s false claim that Corker supported the Iran deal.

Here’s what they say:

President Donald Trump keeps claiming that Sen. Bob Corker supported the Iran nuclear deal.

But he didn’t.

Trump took to Twitter on Tuesday to claim that Tennessee Republican helped “give us” the nuclear deal with Iran negotiated by President Barack Obama’s administration. Earlier this month, he claimed that Corker is “largely responsible for the horrendous Iran Deal!”

Here’s the tweets from Trump in question:



Trump never actually said Corker ‘supported’ the Iran deal. While Trump does exaggerate a little, he’s not wrong in his tweets about Corker.

As Levin explained in 2015, it was Corker’s legislation that gave away the Senate’s treaty power to Obama:

Levin explains that the constitutional way of doing things is for the POTUS to submit a treaty to the Senate and then the members must vote to APPROVE the treaty. If the approval vote fails, the treaty dies.

But what Corker did in his legislation – that passed the Senate by all Republicans but Tom Cotton’s lone nay vote – was to reverse this process and give the Senate a short review period, after which they could DISAPPROVE of the treaty (Iran deal). That disapproval vote would have to be 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. And if they managed that vote, Obama could veto it and they’d have to come up with 67 votes to override it.

In other words this 54 member Republican majority didn’t have a chance in hell of stopping Obama’s Iran deal – and that is exactly the plan that Corker came up with.

So when Trump criticizes Corker for helping Obama give us the Iran deal, he’s exactly right. It wasn’t Corker alone, but it was his legislation as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that made this happen.

Corker argues that Obama would have done this deal anyway by executive fiat, so he had to act to give Congress some kind of review of this Iran treaty. But what good did that do? He made the process so difficult that Republicans could only watch this deal sail through the Senate without a single disapproval vote.

In fact Obama actually pushed Democrats to filibuster the final disapproval vote so that his crappy Iran deal would go through! Obama backstabbed Corker and he was none too happy about it. But his hands were tied because he gave away all his power.

This is what CNN fails to report and why, according to them, an apple is really a banana.


Comment Policy: Please read our comment policy before making a comment. In short, please be respectful of others and do not engage in personal attacks. Otherwise we will revoke your comment privileges.