In his 8am tweet on Tuesday morning, 3 July, the US president said: “Just out that the Obama administration granted citizenship, during the terrible Iran Deal negotiation, to 2,500 Iranians, including to [sic] government officials. How big (and bad) is that?”
Donald Trump cited no evidence for the allegation. In fact, Trump suggested in his tweet, that President Barack Obama’s administration sweetened the Iran nuclear deal by granting U.S. citizenship to 2,500 Iranians, including government officials.
Trump has long derided the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). But this is a new line of criticism, coming nearly two months after Trump announced that the United States was withdrawing from the nuclear deal.
No part of the JCPOA grants U.S. citizenship or legal resident status to Iranians. So where is Trump getting this information from, and does it stand up to scrutiny?
The claim of 2,500 Iranians being made US citizens as part of the nuclear deal was first made in an Iranian newspaper interview on 26 June 2018, with Mojtaba Zonnour, a member of Iran's parliament (Majlis ) who represents a constituency in Qom. Zonnour is an outspoken critic of President Hassan Rouhani and the nuclear agreement, known as JCPOA.
In an interview published on 26 June 2018, Zonnour told the Iranian newspaper, Etemaad: “When Mr Obama, during the JCPOA negotiations, decided to do a favour to these men [Rouhani and his aides], he granted citizenship to 2,500 Iranians and some officials competed with each other over whose children could be part of these 2,500 people.”
The Fars news agency, then re-packaged and re-published the interview with Zonnour , focusing on Zonnour’s claim about a citizenship deal.
Fox News Channel then picked up the Fars news story on Monday, 2 July 2018 , and Sean Hannity, a fervent Trump supporter and confidante, as well as a Fox new host, tweeted the story as “developing” soon after 1pm the same day (Monday ).
Then, the next day, Tuesday 3 July, US president Donald Trump, either knowingly or unknowingly, repeated the wild and false accusations of Iranian parliamentarian , Mojtaba Zonnour.
It seems the US president, Donald Trump is only interested in rubbishing the nuclear deal, ( JCPOA ) and it seems he doesn't even bother to check the origin of the claims he makes.
