Category Archives: Treasury

Hillary’s Server-Gate: Email Hell

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How many servers? How many techs? How many vendors? An epic national security compromise that appears to have no end. But the Hillary hired techs appear to have attempted to use Dark Web tactics and features.

There is a good bet that the FBI by this time has already cracked the erased hard-drive and discovered the contents on the pesky Hillary server and the data, documents and users are being fully investigated. This is investigation is not merely performed by an FBI field office but more it has been assigned to the entire FBI bureau where results and truth are under demand of the intelligence community.

An obscure Bill Clinton domain is noted here.

  1. In part from the Examiner:Hillary Clinton tapped into the vast network of donors cultivated by her family’s foundation to fund one of her first major initiatives as secretary of state: constructing the U.S. pavilion at the 2010 World’s Fair in Shanghai.

    Emails included in the 7,000 pages of records published by the State Department Monday suggest Clinton’s close relationships with corporate executives helped bring in the $61 million needed to build the pavilion.

    Kris Balderston, State’s special representative for global partnerships, led a frantic push to find the sponsors necessary for the expo before it opened in May 2010, relying on many of the same donors that support the Clinton Foundation to pay for the sprawling U.S. exhibit.

    Thirty-nine of the 70 corporate donors to the pavilion were also donors to the Clinton Foundation — a significant portion given that some of the sponsors were Chinese companies.

  2. Beyond Platte River, there were other vendors used by the Clinton Operation where an encryption company was hired and that platform was feeble at best. The server was done a minimum of 3 times.
  3. EXCLUSIVE: Hillary Paid to Hide Identity of the People Running Her Email Server by Breitbart:  Her attempt to hide details about her server has allowed another faceless company access to her classified email information, while doing little to nothing to secure that information from hackers.Clinton’s private email domain clintonemail.com was initially purchased by Clinton aide Eric Hoteham, who listed the Clintons’ Chappaqua, New York home as the contact address for his purchase. But the domain is actually registered to an Internet company designed to hide the true identity of the people running it.

    Clintonemail.com is currently registered to a company called Perfect Privacy, LLC.

    The company has a listed address of 12808 Gran Bay Parkway West in Jacksonville, Florida. But don’t try to get someone from “Perfect Privacy” on the phone. The company merely serves to mask its clients’ personal information by providing its own meaningless contact information on official databases.

    “Did you know that every time you register a domain name, the law requires that your personal information is added to the public “WHOIS” database, where it becomes instantly available to anyone, anywhere, anytime?,” according to the Perfect Privacy website. “Perfect Privacy eliminates these risks by ensuring that your personal information stays private. By signing up for Perfect Privacy when you register your domain, our information is published in the WHOIS database, instead of yours.”

    “We won’t reveal your identity unless required by law or if you breach our Perfect Privacy Service Agreement,” the company explains.

    Perfect Privacy, LLC is owned by Network Solutions, which in turn is owned by Web.com. Network Solutions advertises Perfect Privacy as a way to “Keep Your Contact Information Hidden With Private Registration.”

    The Jacksonville address listed for Perfect Privacy, LLC is actually just the headquarters for Web.com. It is an unassuming gray building just off Interstate 95.

    Breitbart News called a number listed for Network Solutions and, after some on-hold elevator music, an operator confirmed that clintonemail.com is one of the domains that it manages. The company has access to information in the account. But the company does not provide any kind of security for the domain, and instead encourages its clients to buy a standard Norton AntiVirus package like the kind available at retail stores.

    “No, we don’t do that,” a Network Solutions operator told Breitbart News when asked if it provides security for its clients. But, the operator, noted, “Our server automatically checks for known SPAM.”

    Network Solutions, the operator explained, can identify major hacks and can access and change information related to the email account in the event of a hack. The company declined to provide more information without speaking to the domain’s administrator.

    As Breitbart News revealed, Hillary’s email account clintonemail.com was operating with the same IP addresses as presidentclinton.com, an email account managed by the private Clinton Foundation and used by top Clinton Foundation staffers. The IP addresses were based in New York City, meaning that they were sharing the same email network at the same physical location, likely at one of the Clintons’ Midtown Manhtattan offices. Additionally, Chelsea Clinton’s work email account chelseaoffice.com was sharing the same email server.

    wjcoffice.com, an email account used by Bill Clinton staffers, including his former communications director Jay Carson, also shared the same IP address as clintonemail.com.

    Breitbart News has also discovered that clintonemail.com and presidentclinton.com were using the same IP port: port 443.

    That Hillary Clinton shared a server with the Clinton Foundation and the offices of her husband and daughter raises further concerns about the illegality of her private email use, since other Clinton-World employees not affiliated with the State Department certainly had physical access to her server and the classified information on it.

    Hillary’s private server also used the McAfee-owned MXLogic spam-filtering software, which is susceptible to a security breach and which made the information on her server accessible to McAfee employees during the numerous intervals in which her emails were passed through the MXLogic system.

    The server was prone to crashes.

    Hillary Clinton’s private email server went down in February 2010, and the State Department IT team didn’t even know that she was using a private email address, indicating that Clinton Foundation staff was working on her server as opposed to the agency’s IT professionals.

    After the State Department Help Desk sent Clinton’s private email address a routine warning notifying her that her messages were being flagged with fatal errors, Hillary’s top aide Huma Abedin sent the Secretary an email explaining to her what was going on.

    “Ur email must be back up!!,” Abedin wrote. “What happened is judith sent you an email. It bounced back. She called the email help desk at state (I guess assuming u had state email) and told them that. They had no idea it was YOU, just some random address so they emailed. Sorry about that. But regardless, means ur email must be back! R u getting other messages?”

    Hillary’s server went down again during Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

JPOA: Strategic Consequences For U.S. National Security

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What you can know from the military experts that the Democrats that are standing with the White House on the Iran ‘YES’ vote are ignoring.

The full report is here.

Assessment of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action:

By: Co-Chairs General James Conway, USMC (ret.) and General Charles Wald, USAF (ret.)

Strategy Council and Staff

Members

Admiral Mark Fitzgerald, USN (ret.)

Former Commander of U.S. Naval Forces Europe/Africa

General Lou Wagner, USA (ret.)

Former Commander of U.S. Army Materiel Command

Vice Admiral John Bird, USN (ret.)

Former Commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet

Lt. General David Deptula, USAF (ret.)

Former Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, U.S. Air Force Headquarters

Maj. General Lawrence Stutzriem, USAF (ret.)

Former Director, Plans, Policy, and Strategy, North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command

 

We assess:

The JCPOA will not prevent a nuclear Iran. No later than 15 years, the deal’s major nuclear restrictions will lapse, Iran will stand on the brink of nuclear weapons capability, and once again the United States will likely have to devote significant resources and attention to keeping Tehran from attaining nuclear weapons.

  1. The JCPOA will give Iran the means to increase support for terrorist and insurgent proxies, aggravate sectarian conflict and trigger both nuclear and conventional proliferation cascades. It will provide the expansionist regime in Tehran with access to resources, technology and international arms markets required to bolster offensive military capabilities in the vital Persian Gulf region, acquire long-range ballistic missiles and develop other major weapons systems.
  1. Our long-standing allies feel betrayed – even angry – with the JCPOA, seeing it as a weakening of U.S. security guarantees and reversal of decades of U.S. regional security policy. The mere fact that such perceptions persist, regardless of their veracity, will undermine U.S. credibility, threatening to turn them into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  1. Simultaneously, sequestration is diminishing the ability of the United States to respond to Iranian aggression, mitigate security threats emanating from Iran and protect U.S. regional allies. Leaving it with fewer and older ships and planes as well as fewer and less well-trained troops, these cuts will severely damage the U.S. military’s ability to project power in the region, even as the Iranian threat grows.
  1. The United States is in a far better position to prevent a nuclear Iran today, even by military means if necessary, than when the JCPOA sunsets. The strategic environment will grow much more treacherous in the next 15 years. Comparatively, Iran will be economically stronger, regionally more powerful and militarily more capable, while the United States will have a smaller, less capable fighting force, diminished credibility and fewer allies.

Contrary to the false choice between support for the JCPOA and military confrontation, the agreement increases both the probability and danger of hostilities with Iran. Given the deleterious strategic consequences to the United States, implementation of the JCPOA will demand increased political and military engagement in the Middle East that carries significantly greater risks and costs relative to current planning assumptions.

Improved Iran Military Capabilities

The JCPOA will enable Iran to improve its unconventional military capabilities to challenge the strategic position of the United States and its allies in the Middle East. Iran will be able to revitalize its defense industrial base in the short term, even if it devotes only a fraction of the $100 billion or more that will be unfrozen as part of the agreement – more than the government’s entire budget for the current fiscal year – to military spending. It is also set to acquire advanced S-300 air defenses from Russia at the end of this year. Over the medium term, the removal of economic sanctions and the United Nations arms embargo will allow the regime to acquire other advanced technologies and weapons from abroad. And, once sanctions against its ballistic missile program sunset, Iran could more easily develop weapons capable of reaching targets in the Middle East and beyond – including Europe and the United States.

Iran has historically been at a serious disadvantage against the United States in conventional military power, most notably when the use of overwhelming U.S. force in the region compelled it to reverse course dramatically and agree to a ceasefire in the Iran-Iraq War in 1988 and to suspend its nuclear program in 2003. Indeed, Iran lacks large numbers of sophisticated conventional capabilities, including armored forces, air support and fighter aircraft and large surface ships. This likely will remain true for the foreseeable future.

Despite its deficit in conventional capabilities, Iran poses an asymmetric challenge to U.S. military assets and interests in the region. Iran learned from hard experience that it could not match the United States in a direct military confrontation. It also understands the United States relies heavily on unfettered access to close-in bases across the Middle East to keep the region’s vital and vulnerable sea lanes open, conduct combat operations and deter aggression against its allies. Therefore, it has spent more than a decade pursuing a strategy to disrupt or deter the United States from projecting superior forces into the region, or to prevent those forces from operating effectively if deployed. For example, Iran could seek to do so by sealing off the Persian Gulf at the Strait of Hormuz; degrading U.S. freedom of maneuver and military lines of communication; blocking the flow of oil through the Gulf; and targeting naval and commercial vessels, military bases, energy infrastructure and other vital sites inside and outside the Gulf.

Iran has acquired and developed various capabilities to execute this asymmetric strategy, including anti-access/area denial (A2/AD). It possesses the region’s largest arsenal of short (SRBM) and medium-range (MRBM) ballistic missiles, as well as a growing arsenal of cruise missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), to target military and energy installations throughout the Gulf, including U.S. ships. It also has a sizable fleet of fast attack craft, submarines and large numbers of torpedoes and naval mines for choking off Hormuz and attacking the aforementioned targets. The S-300 air defense systems could stymie U.S. air operations around the Gulf, in addition to complicating any strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Russian or Chinese-sourced anti-ship cruise and ballistic missiles could give Iran an even greater standoff capability, allowing it to target U.S. naval assets beyond the Persian Gulf. Iran is also devoting attention to cyber warfare against the battle networks of U.S. forces and the critical infrastructure of its adversaries in the region.7

Assessment of the JCPOA: Strategic Consequences for U.S. National Security

The JCPOA will provide Iran with access to the resources, technology and international arms markets it needs to execute its asymmetric and A2/AD strategy more effectively. We expect it will take full advantage of the opportunity. Iran could simply make or buy more of what it already has, particularly missiles, launchers, submarines and surface warfare ships. It could also upgrade crucial capabilities. Improved precision guidance systems would enable Iran’s ballistic and cruise missiles to target individual ships and installations around the Gulf much more accurately, as would new missile boats, submarines and mobile launchers. If combined with longer-range radars, it could expand this increased threat across wider swathes of the region. Better UAVs or multirole aircraft – not to mention additional advanced air defenses – could permit it to contest U.S. air supremacy over the region. It could also augment its stealth and electronic and cyber warfare capabilities with new technologies from abroad.

Iran might also invest in entirely new capabilities to disrupt and deter operations not only around its immediate vicinity, but also across the region more broadly. These could include long-range strike, satellite, airlift and sealift capabilities as well as the development of long-range ballistic missiles.

The full 14 page report is here.

 

 

 

The Shameful Truth at the Veterans Admin Continues

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The shame of the Veterans Administration continues. Maybe it is time to launch a criminal prosecutor or at least task the FBI to investigate the Veterans Administration. At least, falsifying government documents is a felony.

Watchdog: 900,000 vets may have pending health care requests

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly 900,000 military veterans have officially pending applications for health care from the Department of Veterans Affairs, the department’s inspector general said Wednesday, but “serious” problems with enrollment data make it impossible to determine how many veterans were actively seeking VA health care.

About one-third of the 867,000 veterans with pending applications are likely deceased, the report says, adding that “data limitations” prevent investigators from determining how many now-deceased veterans applied for health care benefits or when. The applications go back nearly two decades, and officials said some applicants may have died years ago.

More than half the applications listed as pending as of last year do not have application dates, and investigators “could not reliably determine how many records were associated with actual applications for enrollment” in VA health care, the report said.

The report also says VA workers incorrectly marked thousands of unprocessed health-care applications as completed and may have deleted 10,000 or more electronic “transactions” over the past five years.

Linda Halliday, the VA’s acting inspector general, said the agency’s Health Eligibility Center “has not effectively managed its business processes to ensure the consistent creation and maintenance of essential data” and recommended a multi-year plan to improve accuracy and usefulness of agency records.

Halliday’s report came in response to a whistleblower who said more than 200,000 veterans with pending applications for VA health care were likely deceased.

The inspector general’s report substantiated that claim and others, but said there was no way to tell for sure when or why the person died. Similarly, deficiencies in the VA’s information security — including a lack of audit trails and system backups — limited investigators’ ability to review some issues fully and rule out data manipulation, Halliday said.

The VA has said it has no way to purge the list of dead applicants, and said many of those listed in the report are likely to have used another type of insurance before they died.

VA spokeswoman Walinda West said Wednesday the agency has publicly acknowledged that its enrollment process is confusing and that the enrollment system, data integrity and quality “are in need of significant improvement.”

Sens. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., chairman and senior Democrat of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, said in a joint statement that the inspector general’s report pointed to “both a significant failure” by leaders at the Health Eligibility Center and “deficient oversight by the VA central office” in Washington.

The lawmakers urged VA to implement the report’s recommendations quickly to improve record keeping at the VA and “ensure that this level of blatant mismanagement does not happen again.”

As of June 30, VA has contacted 302,045 veterans by mail, asking them to submit required documents to establish eligibility, West said. To date, VA has received 36,749 responses and enrolled 34,517 veterans, she said.

“As we continue our work to contact veterans, our focus remains on improving the enrollment system to better serve veterans,” West said.

The Health Eligibility Center has removed a “purge-and-delete functionality” from a computer system used to track agency workloads, West said. VA will provide six months of data to demonstrate that any changed or deleted data on VA workloads has undergone appropriate management review, with approvals and audit trails visible, she said.

IG report: 300,000 vets died while waiting for health care at VA

WASHINGTON –  More than 300,000 American military veterans likely died while waiting for health care — and nearly twice as many are still waiting — according to a new Department of Veterans Affairs inspector general report.

The IG report says “serious” problems with enrollment data are making it impossible to determine exactly how many veterans are actively seeking health care from the VA, and how many were. For example, “data limitations” prevent investigators from determining how many now-deceased veterans applied for health care benefits or when.

But the findings would appear to confirm reports that first surfaced last year that many veterans died while awaiting care, as their applications got stuck in a system that the VA has struggled to overhaul. Some applications, the IG report says, go back nearly two decades.

The report addresses serious issues with the record-keeping itself.

More than half the applications listed as pending as of last year do not have application dates, and investigators “could not reliably determine how many records were associated with actual applications for enrollment” in VA health care, the report said.

The report also says VA workers incorrectly marked thousands of unprocessed health-care applications as completed and may have deleted 10,000 or more electronic “transactions” over the past five years.

Linda Halliday, the VA’s acting inspector general, said the agency’s Health Eligibility Center “has not effectively managed its business processes to ensure the consistent creation and maintenance of essential data” and recommended a multi-year plan to improve accuracy and usefulness of agency records.

Halliday’s report came in response to a whistleblower who said more than 200,000 veterans with pending applications for VA health care were likely deceased.

The inspector general’s report substantiated that claim and others, but said there was no way to tell for sure when or why the person died. Similarly, deficiencies in the VA’s information security — including a lack of audit trails and system backups — limited investigators’ ability to review some issues fully and rule out data manipulation, Halliday said.

The VA has said it has no way to purge the list of dead applicants, and said many of those listed in the report are likely to have used another type of insurance before they died.

VA spokeswoman Walinda West said Wednesday the agency has publicly acknowledged that its enrollment process is confusing and that the enrollment system, data integrity and quality “are in need of significant improvement.”

Sens. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., chairman and senior Democrat of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, said in a joint statement that the inspector general’s report pointed to “both a significant failure” by leaders at the Health Eligibility Center and “deficient oversight by the VA central office” in Washington.

The lawmakers urged VA to implement the report’s recommendations quickly to improve record keeping at the VA and “ensure that this level of blatant mismanagement does not happen again.”

As of June 30, VA has contacted 302,045 veterans by mail, asking them to submit required documents to establish eligibility, West said. To date, VA has received 36,749 responses and enrolled 34,517 veterans, she said.

“As we continue our work to contact veterans, our focus remains on improving the enrollment system to better serve veterans,” West said.

The Health Eligibility Center has removed a “purge-and-delete functionality” from a computer system used to track agency workloads, West said. VA will provide six months of data to demonstrate that any changed or deleted data on VA workloads has undergone appropriate management review, with approvals and audit trails visible, she said.

IRS Commissioner Still has a Job After a $600M Mistake?

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IRS Inspector General

Just check out page 2 of the Inspector General’s report found here.

Over $572 Million in Excess Obamacare Tax Credits Paid Out

FreeBeacon: provided relief to individuals who received overpayments

The Internal Revenue Service paid out over $572 million in excess Obamacare tax credits and sent incorrect forms to over half a million individuals due to a computer programming error, according a new government report.

The report released by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration on Tuesday inspected the interim results of the IRS’s verification of Obamacare’s Premium Tax Credits, which were created to assist low or medium-income individuals and families to purchase health insurance in the marketplace.

 IRS Commissioner

Those who are eligible to receive tax credits under Obamacare can choose to have their credits paid either directly to their health insurance provider as a partial payment towards their monthly premiums—known as the Advance Premium Tax Credit—or can receive the tax credits as one lump sum on their annual income tax return.

According to the IRS, $11 billion worth of tax credits were paid in advance to insurers for fiscal year 2014. By March 26, 2015, the IRS processed around 1.4 million tax returns that showed $4.4 billion in credits, bringing the total to more than $15 billion for 2014. Individuals claimed more than $240 million in additional premium credits and received $572 million in excess advance payments, according to the agency.

The inspection also brought to light a computer programming error that led to more than half a million individuals receiving incorrect health insurance forms.

Incorrect versions of the Health Insurance Marketplace Form, or Form 1095-A, were sent out to 800,000 individuals who participated in Obamacare’s federal exchange.

The forms were sent as a result of a computer programming error that ultimately displayed premium amounts for calendar year 2015 rather than 2014. Taxpayers use the premium amount to determine their allowable Paid Tax Credit.

After the mistake was discovered, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services said that it would send corrected 1095-A forms and urged the affected individuals to hold off filling out their forms. However, the Treasury estimated that 50,000 of these individuals had already filled out their tax returns as of February 2015.

Treasury announced in late February that people who had already completed their tax returns did not have to correct the errors by filing an amended tax return and stated that they would not seek to recoup the excess payments.

“On February 24, 2015, Treasury announced that taxpayers enrolled in the Federal Exchange who have already filed their tax return do not need to file an amended tax return to correct errors in their PTC claim resulting from an incorrect Form 1095-A,” the report said. “Treasury stated that the IRS would not pursue action to recoup excess PTC these taxpayers may have received as a result of the error.”

Treasury further said in March that it would extend this relief to every person who filed an incorrect tax return with the wrong premium amounts.

“On March 20, 2015, Treasury expanded relief from filing an amended tax return to all taxpayers who received and filed a tax return based on an incorrect Form 1095-A,” the report states.

The extent to which the incorrect forms contributed to the $572 million in excess payments is unknown and still being evaluated.

The inspection also found that the IRS could not verify nearly 40 percent of enrollees who comprised the more than $15 billion in dispersed tax credits due to lack of information.

“This is par for the course with Obamacare. Even after years of work and billions of tax dollars spent, this law again and again fails to prevent the prodigious waste of Americans’ money,” said Curtis Kalin, a spokesman for the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste

“There must be an effective system in place to track where subsidies have been sent and to whom. That is one of the most basic safeguards against waste and fraud. Taxpayers deserve the assurance that their money isn’t being hopelessly squandered, especially when there are commonsense ways to prevent it.”

Democrats Met with Adversary Ambassadors, Yes Vote on Iran

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Lobby versus Lobby, Country vs. Country, Money and Influence are all the high standard in Washington DC. This is ‘ZACTLY‘ how it all works in and around the Hill.

Meanwhile, who influenced Barack Obama to rename a mountain or to demand the Washington Redskins NFL football team to seek a new name?

Democrats Admit to Being Lobbied by Russia, China and Europe Before Backing Iran Nuclear Deal

(CNSNews.com) – More than a dozen of the 34 Democratic senators who have declared their support for the Iran nuclear agreement cited arguments by America’s five negotiating partners that there would be no better deal forthcoming if the U.S. rejects this one.

On Wednesday, the number of senators to have publicly stated support for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) climbed to 34 – all Democrats – thereby giving President Obama the backing he needs to sustain his veto of a Republican-led resolution disapproving it, which is expected to pass by mid-September.

As previously undecided senators one by one came out in support of the agreement over the past month, references in their statements to the views of the other P5+1 governments involved in the negotiations – Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany – were strikingly common.

Many of them attended a briefing by ambassadors from those countries in early August.

When she announced her support for the deal on August 6, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said, “In a meeting earlier this week, when I questioned the ambassadors of our P5+1 allies, it also became clear that if we reject this deal, going back to the negotiation table is not an option.”

Four days later Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said she had asked the ambassadors of the five other countries involved in the talks “detailed questions about what their countries and others would do if Congress does not approve the agreement.”

“[N]ot one of them believed that abandoning this deal would result in a better deal,” she said. Instead, “international consensus” would splinter, sanctions would unravel and Iran’s nuclear program would be left unconstrained.

On Aug. 13, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) also referred to the ambassadors’ briefing.

“[S]ome say that, should the Senate reject this agreement, we would be in position to negotiate a ‘better’ one,” he wrote. “But I’ve spoken to representatives of the five nations that helped broker the deal, and they agree that this simply wouldn’t be the case.

Instead, these diplomats have told me that we would not be able to come back to the bargaining table at all, and that the sanctions regime would likely erode or even fall apart…”

“[A]t a recent meeting of leaders from our partner nations, I specifically asked the ambassadors to the U.S. from China, the United Kingdom, and Russia whether their countries would come back to negotiate again should the U.S. walk away from the deal,” Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) said on Aug. 17.

“They unanimously said, ‘No,’ that there was already a deal – the one before Congress.”

“I have no reason to disbelieve all five governments [Russia, China, Britain, France, Germany] speaking together,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) on Aug. 18. “I have heard their warnings that if we walk away from this agreement before even giving it a try, the prospect of further multilateral negotiations yielding any better result is ‘far-fetched.’”

“This agreement is not perfect, but I have personally spoken to leaders representing the P5+1 countries and the European Union who have said quite clearly that if the United States rejects this agreement, they will not join in new negotiations for a better deal,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) said on Aug 24.

“There are those who say that we should go back to the negotiating table and try to get a better deal,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said on Aug. 25. “I respect that view, but I have heard directly from top ambassadors representing our P5+1 partners as well as members of the administration that starting over is not an option.”

“Earlier this month, several of my colleagues and I met with representatives of our five negotiating partners,” Sen. Thomas Carper (D-Dela.) said on Aug. 28.

“They told us bluntly that if Congress kills this deal, the broad coalition of countries imposing sanctions on Iran would collapse,” he said. “If Congress rejects this deal now, a better one will not take its place, they declared.”

Menendez challenges ‘take it or leave it’ argument

Other JCPOA supporters who mentioned having taken into account the views of the other P5+1 ambassadors included Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Chris Coons (D-Dela.) and Robert Casey (D-Pa.).

One of just two Democratic senators to have come out in opposition to the JCPOA, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), challenged the notion that the other P5+1 countries would simply walk away from sanctions if the U.S. rejected the JCPOA and pushed for a better deal.

In his speech announcing his intention to vote to disapprove the deal, Menendez said the attraction of doing business with the United States would far outweigh the lure of Iran’s much smaller economy.

“Despite what some of our P5+1 ambassadors have said in trying to rally support for the agreement, and echoing the administration’s admonition, that it is a take it or leave it proposition, our P5+1 partners will still be worried about Iran’s nuclear weapon desires and the capability to achieve it,” he said.

“They, and the businesses from their countries, and elsewhere, will truly care more about their ability to do business in a U.S. economy of $17 trillion than an Iranian economy of $415 billion,” Menendez said.

He was alluding to U.S. secondary sanctions, which would close the U.S. marketplace to companies and banks that do business with Iran.