Instant Reaction: Ted Cruz Blasts Plan To Send Billions To Ayatollah

I spoke to Texas Senator Ted Cruz today for this Saturday’s Daily Wire Weekend Punch interview, but he provided his immediate reaction to the widely publicized release of the memorandum of understanding with Iran. Here were his thoughts:

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Ted Cruz: To the best of my knowledge, the administration has not yet briefed Congress on what this deal entails. I understand that the administration is doing background calls with reporters, with the briefer whom they identify as a quote, senior administration official. And I’m told that the official ran the MOU verbatim to the reporters. So I assume that is the text, but no one has confirmed it to me.

Ben Domenech: Assuming that it is essentially the framework that has been publicly discussed and that has been going back and forth, do you think it’s a satisfactory end to achieve the goals that this administration set out to initially?

TC: I am hoping there are more deep details and better details than what has been released. What has been released so far suggests that, unfortunately, the president is getting, I think, very poor advice when it comes to this deal. History teaches that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is a bad idea. Under the terms of what’s been released, somewhere between $10 billion and $30 billion will flow to the Ayatollah immediately before they make even a single nuclear concession.

I think that’s ill-advised. That money, if it goes to the Ayatollah, will go to fund terrorists trying to kill Americans and weapons that will be used to try to kill Americans. And it also appears to formalize a permanent role for the Islamic regime controlling the Strait of Hormuz. It is difficult to see what possible benefit to America could come from that.

BD: When it comes to control of the Strait of Hormuz, the idea that they’re just going to wait 60 days and then start charging tolls or fees, however you want to describe it, for going through, it shocks me that this is something acceptable to this administration.

TC: I do not believe the Ayatollah should be able to charge one penny for the free navigation of the seas.

It has also been discussed that the financial reward could be $300 billion to the Ayatollah. If that is true, that would be three times more than the money Joe Biden and Kamala Harris funneled to the Ayatollah. It is a virtual certainty that if $300 billion went to the Ayatollah, that money would be used to murder Americans.

I’ll also say the idea that we should want a Marshall Plan for Iran to come in and rebuild Iran like the United States did for Europe after World War II makes no sense whatsoever.

President Trump was exactly right to initiate military action against Iran because for 47 years the regime has been waging war against America, has been the world’s leading funder of terrorism, and has been murdering Americans for 47 years. Nearly one thousand Americans have been murdered by the Ayatollah and the mullahs. That is why the president acted as a strong commander-in-chief to take out their military capacity. It is not remotely in America’s interest for us to pay to rebuild that capacity that we just took out.