Returning from a campaign swing in New Hampshire, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz graced the set of "Morning Joe" this morning, where he weighed in on matters ranging from his deliberations on entering the 2016 presidential race to the media brouhaha over a three-year-old girl who was startled to hear Cruz tell a Granite State audience that "the world is on fire." But sparks really flew when co-host Mika Brzezinski challenged Cruz for signing onto Senate Republicans' letter to the Iranian leadership, which warned that a future president could nix a deal on the country's nuclear program "with the stroke of a pen."
Although the Iranian foreign minister initially dismissed the letter as a "propaganda ploy," the GOP's missive emerged as a point of contention during Monday's negotiations in Lausanne, Switzerland -- compounding concerns that the letter could embolden Iranian hardliners skeptical of a deal and convince Iranian diplomats that the Americans are not negotiating in good faith.
Brzezinski pressed Cruz on whether he sought such an outcome, asking, “The fact that the twice now it’s come up and caused problems in the negotiations and hard liners are using it, that was the intention? You wanted that to happen?"
“The idea that hard liners are using it is utter silliness,” Cruz asserted.
Playing to McCarthyite type, the senator implied that U.S. negotiators aren't defending America's national security.
“If we actually had negotiators that were trying to defend our national security, if anything the letter would help them, because what the letter makes clear is for any deal to be binding, it has to go through Congress," Cruz said.
Unsatisfied, Brzezinski said, “I’m still talk about the fact that you are saying to me that what’s happening now in terms of the hardliners using the letter to stall on these negotiations was actually a part of your intention. It just seems extremely destructive. … I think it’s not inappropriate for Congress to have a say and to have a voice. But to interfere with a negotiation with Iran, and to actually possibly even undermine a deal in the making — basically the next step to that is to just get right down the road to war.”
Joe Scarborough then interjected that "[t]he choice is not between war and a bad deal," but as Brzezinski noted, no deal has yet been unveiled.
“Do you know exactly what the deal is to call it a bad deal?” Brzezinski asked Cruz. “Do you have all the information?”
The senator conceded that he did not, but he charged that the administration has preferred to leak details of the negotiations to the media, rather than share them with Congress.
(h/t Mediate)
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