Washington—Today, United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations, Appropriations, and Banking Committees, joined America’s Newsroom on Fox News to discuss the president’s interim memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Iran.
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Partial Transcript
Hagerty on the U.S.-Iran MOU: I spoke with the White House last night. We are moving in the right direction. I think the president has articulated this clearly. We will all know the text—we’ll all know the content—on Friday. I think there’s been a massive amount of misreporting. It has been amazing to me how breathlessly many members of the U.S. media are willing to run with Iranian talking points and fake news to put it out there… The discussion I had with folks at the White House last night—certainly, we’re moving in the right direction. I just make a very clear differentiation here that seems to be missed very often by the media. This [MOU] isn’t at all like the JCPOA. President Obama actually paid for the Iranians’ terrorism—he funded it. President Trump has put the Iranian nuclear program at the bottom of a mountain. He has put their navy at the bottom of the sea. He has terminated their ability to maintain control of their airspace. It is a fundamentally different situation that we see ourselves in… [Iran] will have to take very specific steps to release any financial aid. So, when President Trump says he thinks the Iranians will move in the right direction, every incentive is in place for them to do that. And if they don’t, they are going to find their economy devastated even further, and the consequences will be even greater… I feel very positive about where we are going, and my hat is off to President Trump because instead of funding terrorism—the way Iran was funded by Obama—he is actually stopping terrorism in the Middle East.
Hagerty on the price of oil and Democrats’ disapproval of military action in Iran: The notion that [military action] did not need to happen is absolutely false. If you look at the pace with which Iran was building up its ballistic missile capability and its drone capability, they were going to be at the point where they could eventually overwhelm the rest of the world [with a shield of immunity] and then they would have all day long to pursue their nuclear program. President Trump saw this—the math was clear, and it was time to act. We absolutely needed to act because, otherwise, Iran would have been in a position to hold the rest of the world hostage…We’ve already seen what they’ve done here in the past months. This absolutely needed to be done. The world will be a safer place once this [MOU] is in position.
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