White House says GOP’s Iran letter ‘without precedent’

For the second day in a row, the White House lashed out at Senate Republicans for a letter they sent to Iranian leaders that administration officials say is intended to undercut nuclear negotiations.

 

“We feel that this was a blatant, flagrant and partisan attempt to interfere with the negotiations,” principal deputy press secretary Eric Schultz told reporters aboard Air Force One. 

 

{mosads}Schultz said the letter, which said future presidents and lawmakers could negate any nuclear pact President Obama strikes with Iran, “was without precedent from the past two centuries.”

 

The letter has triggered a war of words between the White House and Republicans in Congress. On Monday, Obama accused GOP lawmakers of finding “common cause” with hard-line Iranian officials who are also opposed to a nuclear deal.

 

Vice President Biden, a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, bashed Republicans in a lengthy statement Monday night, saying the letter violated long-established Senate protocol on foreign policy.

 

“Honorable people can disagree over policy,” he said. “But this is no way to make America safer or stronger.”

 

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who signed the letter along with 46 other senators, fired back at the administration Tuesday morning. 

 

“They’ve been killing Americans for 35 years, they’ve killed hundreds of troops in Iran, now they control five capitals in the Middle East,” he said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “They are nothing but hard-liners in Iran, and if they do all of those things without a nuclear weapon, imagine what they would do with one.”

 

But Schultz said the issue was how Republicans went about airing their complaints. He called the letter “reckless, irresponsible and misguided.”

 

“We have one president at a time in the United States, and that president is charged with conducting our foreign policy,” he said.