Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s exchange with Senator Cory Booker at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Iran produced one of the week’s sharpest televised confrontations, with Booker arguing that Iran has been strengthened by the conflict because it has discovered the power of closing the Strait of Hormuz and that America is now begging to get back into a deal it trashed, and Rubio responding that Iran has no navy left, has lost a substantial portion of its defense industrial base and missile launching capacity, is losing hundreds of millions of dollars a day, has hyperinflation, a completely devalued currency, and is struggling to make payroll for government workers.
James Fitzpatrick, attorney, Army veteran, and director of the Center to Advance Security in America, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess the exchange, the state of Iran negotiations, the anti-weaponization fund’s suspension, and the interim DNI appointment.
On Booker’s claim that Iran is now in a stronger negotiating position, Fitzpatrick called it an idiotic and asinine statement. He said the idea that any sane person could argue Iran is stronger after losing its navy, having its military and government leadership decimated, and watching its economy collapse to the point where it cannot make payroll defies basic logic. He said the reason Iran is negotiating with the United States at all is precisely because it is in such a weak position, not because it holds the upper hand. He acknowledged Rubio’s core assessment is correct while sharing Proft’s discomfort with Rubio’s statement that the war is over, which Proft said is too cute by half given that Iranian forces attacked a Kuwaiti air base as recently as forty-eight hours before the interview and the president himself has repeatedly reserved the right to resume military operations if negotiations fail to produce an acceptable agreement.
On the narrow path to a deal, Fitzpatrick said Rubio identified the two specific items that need to be resolved before negotiations can meaningfully advance: a specific commitment from Iran on how it will dispose of the highly enriched uranium buried in its mountain facilities, and a commitment to either long-term limitations on enrichment activity or its total cancellation. He said the space for negotiation is in how those things are accomplished, not whether they happen, and that until the IRGC makes genuine commitments on both points there is no real deal to structure.
On the anti-weaponization fund’s suspension after acting Attorney General Todd Blanch backed away from it following pressure from Senate Republicans and the Wall Street Journal editorial board, Fitzpatrick said he was a Trump 2020 administration alumni who watched many friends have their lives attempted to be ruined by Jack Smith, Merrick Garland, and the Biden Justice Department. He said the FBI came to people’s doors, served subpoena after subpoena, forced people to hire lawyers and spend tens of thousands of dollars defending against garbage legal theories, and that those people deserve to be made whole in some way. He was critical of the Wall Street Journal editorial’s comparison between Trump and Ken Griffin, who settled his IRS leak lawsuit for a public apology rather than money. He said Griffin is in a completely different financial position than most of the people victimized by the Biden-era lawfare, that the fund was never about Trump getting money personally, and that the characterization of it as a MAGA slush fund misses the point entirely. He said the author of that editorial clearly never had the FBI show up at their door and has no standing to dismiss the genuine harm done to real people who lacked Griffin’s resources to absorb the costs.
He connected the anti-weaponization fund to a broader institutional accountability problem, pointing to the case Proft discussed earlier in the week of the entrepreneur whose company was seized by the FTC, vindicated by a unanimous Supreme Court ruling, and is now facing criminal prosecution by a Biden-appointed DOJ attorney before an Obama-appointed judge who has denied six motions to dismiss. He said if the executive agencies cannot be held accountable, if judges who engage in what he characterized as outrageous conduct cannot be removed through the existing judicial complaint process because fellow judges review each other’s conduct, and if Congress will not act, then something like the anti-weaponization fund becomes necessary or you lose the population’s faith in the justice system entirely, which he said is far more damaging to the republic than any amount of elitist editorial criticism.
On the appointment of Bill Pulte as interim Director of National Intelligence following Tulsi Gabbard’s resignation to care for her husband, whose background is in housing through his role as Federal Housing Finance Agency director rather than intelligence, Fitzpatrick said he did not want to second-guess the president’s personnel decisions and trusts there are reasons behind the choice. He noted that Pulte made criminal referrals from the FHFA against New York Attorney General Leticia James and Congressman Adam Schiff for mortgage fraud, and acknowledged that may have factored into the selection, saying if it did that is an interesting consideration but one whose wisdom he would leave to the president’s judgment.