Press TV - US President Donald Trump says he believes Iran is not in compliance with the international nuclear deal reached in 2015, accusing Tehran of not living up to the spirit of the "horrible agreement."
"I don't think Iran is in compliance," Trump told reporters on Thursday at his private golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. "I don't think they're living up to the spirit of the agreement."
I think its a horrible agreement, he said. "I think you'll see some very strong things taking place if they don't get themselves in compliance."
Trumps comments come as the International Atomic Energy Agency has time and again reported that Iran has been abiding by the terms of the nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA.
Despite the IAEAs reports, Washington has recently approved a series of anti-Iran sanctions. The head of the Iranian task force to monitor the implementation of the deal says the US sanctions have broken the terms of the JCPOA.
Under the deal, which took effect in January last year, Iran undertook to put limits on its nuclear program in exchange for the termination of nuclear-related sanctions imposed against the Islamic Republic.
The White House is bound by US law to notify Congress of Irans compliance with the nuclear deal every 90 days. Congress would then have to continue to withhold certain nuclear sanctions against Iran.
The Trump administration notified Congress of Irans compliance for the first time in April.
In July, Trump reluctantly agreed for the second time to verify that Iran was in compliance, based on the recommendation of his national security team and the intelligence communitys collection and analysis.
But the president then immediately commissioned a group of administration staffers who have no intelligence background to generate a rationale for declaring Iran to be in violation of the deal at the next 90-day review, Foreign Policyreported last month.
Trump told The Wall Street Journal in late July that he expects the detailed studies hes commissioned to validate his belief that Iran is noncompliant.
Experts say Trumps actions risks politicizing intelligence and undermining the agreement.
This is a dangerous place to go. At the most basic level, one would hope that foreign policy decisions with potentially dramatic consequences would be based on the best available facts, not political pretexts, said David S. Cohen, who was also assistant secretary of the Treasury Department for terrorism and financial intelligence during the administration of President Barack Obama.
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Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran Ali Akbar Salehi[/caption]The head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), Ali Akbar Salehi, says Tehran will keep all options on the table if the United States violates the deal.
The US will be the one to sufferif it breaches the deal, Salehi said in an interview with Lebanon-based Arabic-language al-Mayadeen news network published on Tuesday.
