Jeremy Scahill

The US representatives then go back, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, and what they've been saying publicly, Witkoff has been saying this, is that the Iranians somehow came into the meetings and they were bragging that they had all of these kilograms of weapons-grade bomb-making material.

And the reality is, and this is so important for people to understand, the Iranians came in and they said, here, we're going to tell you everything that we have.

And we know that you're concerned about it.

And we're willing to either ship it to another country or dilute it as part of any deal.

And the US twisted that.

either through ignorance or malice, into the Iranians were coming there and saying, we can make 10 or 11 bombs.

The point is, none of this was about the nuclear.

The entire point of this was that the US needed to get as many interceptor missiles to the region as possible.

They needed to get that second aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, because it had been involved with Venezuela.

They had to move it all the way across the world.

When they moved that ship, I knew there was going to be war.

because those soldiers were supposed to go on rotation and that's a big deal in the military.

So they moved that thing over.

The entire thing was a fraud, an epic lie.

None of this was actually about Iran's nuclear weapons capacity.

It never was.

It was entirely about fraudulent negotiations as a veneer to build up enough military force to sustain what they believed would be a potentially multi-month massive bombing campaign.

Well, I mean, a couple things here.

One is I think it's helpful to think about the way that Trump runs things while he's president.

And this was true in his first term, and it's definitely true now.