Joe Biden Caught Admitting Iran Nuclear Deal 'Is Dead' in Video

Video has emerged on social media that shows President Joe Biden saying that the nuclear deal with Iran, which has been the subject of negotiations, "is dead."

The clip was recorded on the sidelines of a November 4 election campaign event in California, according to Damon Maghsoudi, a software engineer living in the United States who shared it on Twitter.

Biden is asked by a member of the public to announce the future of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—the 2015 deal to curb Tehran from developing nuclear weapons scrapped in 2018 by former President Donald Trump, which the U.S. has been trying to renegotiate.

"President Biden, would you please announce that the JCPOA is dead?" a woman is heard asking. Biden responded, "no," adding that he could not say exactly why, "for a lot of reasons."

"It is dead but we're not going to announce it," Biden said, before adding, "long story."

The woman then said that "we just don't want any deals with the mullahs," referring to the ruling regime in Tehran, which has clamped down on protests throughout the country.

Biden replied, "I know they don't represent you, but they will have a nuclear weapon that they will represent."

Maghsoudi told Newsweek that the woman who questioned Biden was Sudi Farokhnia, the acting president of Iranian-American Democrats of California, who shot the video herself.

The video was also shared by Jason Brodsky, policy director of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) and reported by the news network Iran International.

Brodsky told Newsweek that Biden's comments "are a reflection of reality" and that the JCPOA, which would rein in Tehran's nuclear program in return for relief from economic sanctions, "has been dead for some time."

"The non-proliferation benefits that the deal promised are not worth the sanctions relief offered," he said. "The JCPOA is based on a political, geopolitical, and technical reality from 2015 that does not exist anymore. There is also no sustainable political constituency in the United States to keep it alive."

Brodsky said that Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has not been interested in reviving the deal for two years. His regime's enhancement of enrichment capacity, removal of International Atomic Energy Agency surveillance cameras and transfer of arms to Russia for use against Ukraine "have sealed the JCPOA's fate."

"I think the Biden administration wants to keep the corpse of the deal on the table to prevent Tehran from enriching to 90 percent and escalating further. But there are real questions as to whether there is adequate deterrence in place to prevent that from happening," Brodsky said.

The European Union's foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, has held up hope for the deal, saying last week that "we do not have a better option" to stop Tehran from developing nuclear weapons.

However, another obstacle to the pact and doing a deal with Iran is a brutal crackdown by its regime against protests. These were sparked by the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was arrested after she was accused of not wearing her hijab properly.

Newsweek reached out to the White House for comment.

Update 12/20/22, 10:30 a.m. ET: This article was updated with comment from Jason Brodsky.

Update 12/21/22, 04:30 a.m. ET: This article was updated with comment from Damon Maghsoudi.