Menendez: Obama’s Cuba, Iran moves ‘misguided’

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) on Sunday said there is a fundamental flaw in President Obama’s recent dealings with Cuba and Iran.

{mosads}“I think the president has a misguided calculation that if you open your hands to dictators they will unclench their fists,” Menendez, who has been indicted on federal corruption charges, said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Menendez began by questioning Obama’s meeting with Cuban President Raúl Castro on Saturday in Panama City. He said the president’s decision was surprising, given Cuba’s open hostility toward the U.S. over the last half-century.

“There’s a fundamental problem in this process,” Menendez, the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said of Obama’s overtures toward Havana.

“While Raul Castro may have said some nice things about President Obama, last month he arrested 600 political dissidents in Cuba,” he added.

Menendez said Obama’s friendly gestures toward Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, were not much better. The Obama administration announced a tentative agreement on Tehran’s nuclear program on April 2.

“The Iranians should not get a signing bonus,” Menendez said of Iran’s calls for immediate sanctions relief as part of the framework agreement.

The New Jersey lawmaker said the draft accord’s stakes were too high for Obama to act alone. He vowed that Congress would weigh in on its details before the June 30 deadline for a final deal.

“I’m not backing down,” Menendez said of criticisms against his bill, co-authored by Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), that would allow Congress 60 days to review the final agreement.

“It is a congressional duty,” he argued. “I believe that such a process in no way undermines the final negotiations.”

The framework deal would give Iran economic sanctions relief in exchange for greater restrictions on its nuclear energy program.

The New Jersey lawmaker promised that “the facts” would vindicate him from the charges he faced. He added that he did not believe the Justice Department had targeted him for criticizing the president’s policies.

“I cannot imagine that an administration, this or any other, would go to such lengths to overturn our constitutional democracy,” Menendez said.