French Pres. Hollande's senior adviser: ' if Congress rejects Iran deal, a better deal could be achieved'.

French Pres. Hollande's senior adviser: ' if Congress rejects Iran deal, a better deal could be achieved'. (Jpost).

The lawmakers, Democrat Loretta Sanchez and Republican Mike Turner, both members of the House Armed Services Committee, met with the French official in Paris earlier this month to discuss the Iran deal.

According to both lawmakers Audibert expressed support for the deal overall, "but also directly disputed Kerry’s claim that a Congressional rejection of the Iran deal would result in the worst of all worlds, the collapse of sanctions and Iran racing to the bomb without restrictions."

“He basically said, if Congress votes this down, there will be some saber-rattling and some chaos for a year or two, but in the end nothing will change and Iran will come back to the table to negotiate again and that would be to our advantage,” Sanchez told Josh Rogin of Bloomberg View.

“He thought if the Congress voted it down, that we could get a better deal,” Sanchez added.

Bloomberg's Rogin wrote in his report that a spokesman for the French embassy in Washington issued a statement saying it "formally denies the content of the remarks."

According to the report, Audibert also disagreed with Kerry's assertion that if the Congress doesn't lift US sanctions against Iran, the international sanctions regime would collapse and American competitors would rush into Iran to do business.

Audibert reportedly told Sanchez and Turner that if US sanctions were kept in place, it would effectively prevent the West from doing extensive business in Iran.

“I asked him specifically what the Europeans would do, and his comment was that the way the US sanctions are set in, he didn’t see an entity or a country going against them, that the risk was too high,” Sanchez said.

According to the report, Audibert also expressed to Sanchez and Turner some misgivings about the deal that was reached with Iran, including his belief that the deal should have been negotiated to last forever, not start to expire in as few as 10 years. 

He also told the lawmakers that "he didn’t understand why Iran needed more than 5,000 centrifuges for a peaceful nuclear program." In addition, the French official reportedly "expressed concerns about the robustness of the inspections and verification regime under the deal, according to the lawmakers." Hmmm.....It's becoming pretty obvious that Kerry the man with most personal 'connections' to Iran was the man giving in to Iran. Read the full story here.