Former national security adviser: 'Obsessed' Trump’s absurd claim Obama helped fund Iranian aggression shows his ‘extreme weakness and insecurity’

When President Donald Trump held a press conference on Wednesday morning, he tried to blame the Obama Administration for the Iran crisis — claiming that “the missiles fired last night at us and our allies were paid for with the funds made available by the last administration.” Susan Rice, former national security adviser under President Barack Obama, discussed Trump’s claims about the discontinued Obama/Iran nuclear deal when interviewed by NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell on Wednesday. And not surprisingly, Rice found Trump’s comments to be absurd.

“This is another series of despicable lies by President Trump,” Rice told Mitchell. “The fact that three years after taking office, he remains obsessed with President Obama just shows President Trump’s extreme weakness and insecurity.”

Rice continued, “The facts about the Iran nuclear deal are that it, effectively, halted and rolled back Iran’s nuclear program. In the years since the signing of the deal in 2015 — up until President Trump’s unilateral withdrawal, abandoning our allies against the advice of his advisers, there were no proxy attacks by Iranian proxies on U.S. personnel in Iraq. There were no efforts by Iran to attack our drones in the Persian Gulf or attack shipping. The nuclear program was under control.”

Rice went on to say that Trump decided to “unilaterally” and “recklessly” withdraw from the nuclear deal, imposing sanctions on Iran — and, Rice told Mitchell, “it was in the wake of that that we found ourselves in this escalatory cycle that’s led to where we are today — a very dangerous moment.”

The former national security adviser was highly critical of the drone attack that killed Iranian military commend Qasem Soleimani, outlining some of the repercussions

Rice told Mitchell, “This was an extremely risky and costly decision to kill Qasem Soleimani….. The Iraqis want us out of Iraq; that’s extraordinarily dangerous for our interests, it’s a victory for Iran. The fight against ISIS has been suspended.”

Moreover, Rice added, retaliation from Iran is likely.

“We can be pretty confident that the Iranians are going to use proxies, cyberattacks and possibly even terrorism to continue to retaliate, as they have historically, for the killing of Soleimani,” the former national security adviser warned.