Republicans running for the White House celebrated news of the release of five American prisoners from Iran on Saturday, but they had no kudos for the administration of President Obama.





News of the release, part of a prisoner swap in which the United States offered clemency to seven Iranians, arrived as Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart were finalizing the deal to end economic sanctions on Iran, part of nuclear non-proliferation deal that Republican presidential candidates have decried and vowed to end if elected.


“I want to start by giving thanks on news we got today that four Americans are coming home,” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas told a gathering of about 600 Tea Party activists in Myrtle Beach, S.C., but he went on to denounce the deal that brought them back as “a piece of propaganda for both Iran and the Obama administrations.”


“We've got to shake our head with how it's happened. The details of this deal are still coming out. You notice the Obama administration has announced the good news but hides the bad news,” Cruz told the cheering crowd, as he denounced the release of “seven people who were incarcerated for violating the sanctions on Iran and helping Iran obtain nuclear weapons.”


Singling out one of the prisoners Iran is releasing, Pastor Saeed Abedini, Cruz added “there is a false moral equivalence in a deal like this. Pastor Saeed Abedini was in prison for the crime of preaching the Gospel. He shouldn't have been there.”


Other candidates were equally critical, with a partial exception: Jeb Bush told reporters in New Hampshire that while he agrees “there isn't much symmetry” in the sets of prisoners that the two nations are exchanging, “I'm not being critical of the deal without knowing all the facts.”


But the former Florida governor, a brother and son of former presidents, went on to blast the Obama administration for “tripping all over itself” to protect the nuclear deal. “They're missing the larger point, which is that we need to confront the ambitions of Iran on a larger basis.”


Like many Republicans, Bush believes that the Iranians can't be trusted not to develop nuclear weapons, despite a regime of international inspections imposed by the deal.


At the same Tea Party event Cruz attended, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee questioned why the Obama administration agreed to talks with a country that was holding U.S. citizens. “It's great that these prisoners have been released,” the Washington Post quoted Huckabee as telling reporters. “They should have been released before we ever sat down at the negotiating table.”


Alluding to the economic impact the lifting of sanctions will have on Iran, billionaire Donald Trump suggested that heretofore pariah nation is getting the better end of the deal. Iran “getting seven people, so essentially they get $150 billion plus seven, and we get four.”


In Iowa, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie termed himself “grateful” for the Americans' release, before attacking Obama: “The concern I have, and we don't know yet, is that the president made a trade. Now, when this president makes trades, this is a big problem,” he told a crowd at a town hall in Ames, Iowa, according to a transcript released by his campaign.



By TRIB Total Media