Outgoing House speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) suggested Monday that Iran’s decision to convict Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian on espionage charges should deter President Obama from implementing the nuclear deal his team recently negotiated with the Islamic Republic.

“Jason Rezaian is known by many in Tehran — including Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif — as a ‘good’ and ‘decent’ reporter,” Boehner said Monday. “But that didn’t protect him from being tortured, abused, and wrongly convicted by the same regime that will be trusted to inspect itself under a nuclear deal that will give Iran legitimacy and billions in cash. President Obama needs to think long and hard before moving forward.”

A trio of House Republicans were more explicit in their call for Obama to put the nuclear deal on ice because of Iran’s abuse of Rezaian and three other American captives. “We urge the Obama administration not to lift any economic sanctions until Iran vacates this absurd judgment and releases all four Americans wrongly imprisoned by Iran,” Representative Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.), Representative Peter Roskam (R., Ill.), and Representative Lee Zeldin (R., N.Y.) said in a joint statement. “It is disgusting to reward a country that so brazenly violates international law and abuses our fellow citizens.

Iranian president Hassan Rouhani recently floated the idea of a prisoner exchange, and preliminary reports indicate that Rezaian may be used as a bargaining chip. “Rouhani has suggested that Iran might push to expedite the release of Rezaian and two other Iranian Americans if the United States freed Iranian citizens convicted of violating economic sanctions against Tehran,” according to the Washington Post.

Such an exchange might meet with resistance on the Hill, where GOP lawmakers think that Obama should have won the release of the prisoners as a condition of the nuclear talks. “The lives of Jason Rezaian, Amir Hekmati, Saeed Abedini, and Robert Levinson should not be a ‘concession’ in President Obama’s Iran deal,” Zeldin, Roskam, and Pompeo said.

— Joel Gehrke is a political reporter for National Review.

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