Senator James Lankford is with Secure Freedom Radio

Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma kicks off today’s Secure Freedom Radio, talking about Iran and what Republicans can do to stop this disastrous display of American diplomacy. Click here for the audio version.

FG: Welcome to Secure Freedom Radio. This is Frank Gaffney, your host and guide for what I think of as an intelligence briefing on the war for the free world. It is a great privilege to have with us a man who has responsibility for overseeing our intelligence agencies as a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He also serves on the Appropriations Committee and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committees in the United States Senate. He is Senator James Lankford from Oklahoma. It’s a great privilege to have him with us, and thank you Senator for your time.

JL: Glad to be on with you.

FG: You spoke shortly before the Senate went into recess on the floor about your concerns about the ‘Obamabomb’ deal, the negotiated arrangement with Iran. Give us if you would, very quickly, your sense of what’s wrong with that picture and how the Senate ought to proceed with respect to it.

JL: The challenge, the hard thing is to continue to just come back and focus and say, “We’re not going to trust Iran; we’re going to verify.” Of the many loopholes that are in this deal, the biggest one is that they can’t verify. They continue to say the words verify, but they can’t actually do it. The IAEA, which is the UN organization that will actually do the inspections, which by the way according to the agreement no Americans can be a part of that inspection team ever, so this UN body that’s going to come in and do the inspections, they have a separate agreement with Iran to how they are going to actually verify. So literally I can’t read that agreement. John Kerry has told me he hasn’t seen it; he won’t read it. No member of the administration will see it or read it. So we literally cannot verify how they are going to verify these locations. They just say we’re going to, but there’s no process to actually know how they’re actually going to do that. They’re only looking for uranium. They’re not dealing with their ballistic missiles program. They’re not dealing with triggering devices. They’re not dealing with delivery vehicles. They’re only trying to search for uranium and just locked in on that one element. And it ignores the reality that uranium can be purchased from Pakistan; uranium can be purchased from North Korea. There are other places to do it. We’re not actually trying to get back to any of their previous military dimensions to find out what they’ve done in the past. Just over and over again as you go through the talk of inspections, you can seem to find one more loophole after another, and some of the largest of them include that if we ever, what they call “snap back” sanctions, if we ever try and re-impose sanctions, Iran can see that as a violation of our side of the deal regardless of what they’ve done, and they can walk away entirely. The two things Iran needs to be able to get to a bomb is time and money, and this deal provides them more time to continue to do their research and about $60 billion of international money that’s been parked around the world in the sanctions. So they get time and money on this, and we get nothing in return.

FG: It sounds from what you’ve said, Senator James Lankford, that when the president makes representations not only about the verification being the most comprehensive in the history of the world, but the pathways to a bomb being completely foreclosed and Iran really foresworn pursuing nuclear weapons, that these are, to put a fine point on it, fraud, misrepresentations.

JL: Yes, there’s no way. They continue to talk about how they’re going to shut down every pathway towards getting too many materials or any construction, all the supply chain. They continue to say it’s not possible to be able to track down all supply chain areas to be able to get into Iran. So they’re trusting on the intelligence community, which are some fantastic people and who do great work to protect the United States, but they would tell you even they can’t go and find every single pathway of every single part of the supply chain to be able to protect it. So the administration says they’re going to have inspections, but they don’t know how those inspections are going to work. They’ll continue to say that they’re going to be thorough, but they don’t know how the inspections are actually going to be done. And they’re hoping that they’ll be able to pick up every part of the supply chain so they can catch it before they actually advance. But all of those are hope. That’s not a real plan, and that’s not a real possibility to be able to know that with great certainty.

FG: Senator, let me ask you about the International Atomic Energy Agency you mentioned a moment ago. They will be submitting a report that is likely to come out with a finding that there is no active nuclear weapons program in Iran at the moment, which, as I understand the terms of this agreement, could trigger the removal in very short order of both the embargo on conventional weapon shipments to Iran and ballistic missile technology. Is that your understanding, and if so, doesn’t this problem become vastly worse right away?

JL: Could be. There are several different deadlines here. The initial one is that the IAEA will have to certify that the Iranians are in the first stage of compliance, and then after that they will begin their inspections. Once they go and start their inspections process, then they set the timeline of what they consider that this is for peaceful purposes for their nuclear program. Now, there’s no certain timeline that is set on that. It’s just whenever they feel satisfied that it is for peaceful purposes based on their inspections. The interesting thing is the way the agreement is written, there is clearly an “or”, o-r, in this agreement. So they’ll talk about their eight years of sanctions, or whenever the IAEA determines their nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. Is that two years? Is that six months? Is that eight years? No one knows, and there’s no definite definition of that. It is any time period that the UN determines, “Yes, we believe they are in compliance, and this is a peaceful program.” Then, all those sanctions are lifted much faster. So, again, the president continues to talk about eight years, ten years, fifteen years, for different parts of it. All of those have an “or” attached to it, and its or when the UN actually determines this is a peaceful purpose nuclear program. Then all bets are off.

FG: Senator James Lankford, as I mentioned, you are a member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee as well as the Intelligence Committee. Recently you approved out of committee a measure called the Critical Infrastructure Protection Act, which argues that we need a strategy for protecting our electric grid. One of my real concerns has been that the Iranians understand the vulnerability of the electric grid and seem to be pursuing techniques, perhaps cyber, perhaps electromagnetic pulse, to exploit that vulnerability. This could give rise, really in time at least, to an existential threat. How serious a problem do you regard that to be, and how urgently should we be addressing it?

JL: The EMP, electromagnetic pulse, technology has been around for a very long time. It is the ability to be able to detonate a device over the earth to be able to put out a magnetic pulse. For a region it would knock out all power for that area. Now, if you can just imagine what happens in many of our major cities if power is knocked out not just for hours but for weeks or months and what happens with life safety, what happens with emergency response, what happens with food distribution. Our cities and towns are not setup for that, so the key issue that we have is not only a device, but just a solar storm could send out the kind of pulse that could actually take down electricity. So this is a vulnerability that we have. This is an area that has been discussed for a long time. And it is one of those things that we can proactively address, and then if once we address it we don’t have to be as concerned about it because we have the possibilities there. So it’s basic breakers, the systems that have to be in place on the lines, that is repetition of a lot of the transformer lines because those will all be blown so we have to have enough in backup so that we can actually respond and get those back up in time. All those things can be done. This is technology that is possible. We’re just pushing it and saying let’s move it from, “We can protect ourselves to we did protect ourselves on it.” This is an area that is not a pie in the sky fantasy. This is real technology that exists and that Iran can have. So we want to make sure that we are very, very well protected on that.

FG: Senator, and we’ve only got about a minute left, but very quickly, just your thoughts on what we’re hearing about the Hillary Clinton email problems and the degree to which this may represent a real blow to U.S. intelligence and security.

JL: The big challenge is obviously there’s a political issue and a presidential campaign going on, but forget all those dynamics. But let’s just get back to the real raw facts of what’s happening. If there are top-secret files that are on a non-secure server that Iran, that North Korea, that China, that Russia could actually get access to and have vulnerabilities to, that is an enormous security risk for the United States and it’s very sloppy process for someone who is Secretary of State. We now know there were top-secret files on that server, and we’re trying to find out how many are out there and obviously what happened to them and if we can track how many places those things went and to believe as Secretary of State that international actors are not trying to get to your files or to say if I store them at my house, which was the initial line, we had Secret Service around the house so no one could get to it I think is a little naïve. This is not an issue of someone breaking in and stealing physically the sever that has now been handed over to the FBI. These are hackers that get into the line, and you do not see them and a Secret Service agent outside the building is not going to slow that down. So we have major issues that we have to deal with. I handle top-secret documents all the time due to my position in the Intelligence Committee. I can tell you I would never ever put them on a private server. I would never take them out of the secure facility that they are stored in to make sure those documents are handled correctly. I would hope the same for the Secretary of State or someone who wishes to be the president.

FG: Well, we are on notice that it is a felony offense to do otherwise, so it certainly seems as though it should be a disqualifier with respect to judgment if not disabling fact if there’s a prosecution. Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, thank you very much for joining us here at Secure Freedom Radio. It’s great to talk with you, sir. We appreciate your service. Enjoy your time off, and we’ll look forward to your leadership on the Iran deal when you get back.