Ben Rhodes

We were negotiating on the nuclear program.

And then there were these kind of different durations for aspects of the deal.

Some of the more strict limitations of the deal lasted 10 years.

Some of them lasted 15 years.

People freaked out about this.

But Tim, to me, that always was...

The most, I don't know, absurd critique in some ways because that's how most nuclear arms treaties are, right?

The U.S.-Russia New START treaty that we negotiated with the Russians during the Obama years had a 10-year duration.

Nobody freaked out about that because you renegotiate after 10 years, right?

You see how things are there.

And I should say that the sanctions on Iran – this is important –

remained in place.

The United States did not lift sanctions on Iran.

They got sanctions relief.

They didn't get sanctions removed under the deal.

So again, there's so many more dimensions to this argument.

No, this is a different piece of the deal.

But essentially, when we tallied up how much we thought Iran was getting from the deal, it went up to about $50 billion.

They had something like $150 billion.

And again, I'm literally going off of my memory from 10 years ago.