White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough is confident whoever is elected in 2016 will preserve the Iran deal and Paris climate deal. Appearing this morning on This Week, McDonough told George Stephanopoulos, “The next president is going to find when they come in here is that that climate deal united the world for the first time on one of the major challenges we face.”
Of the Iran deal, McDonough said after its full implementation, “all of Iran’s paths to a nuclear bomb will be blocked.”
Here’s the full exchange:
STEPHANOPOULOS: They’ve also promised to undo what the president has done on climate change, on immigration, on guns. How worried are you that the progress that you just cited is ephemeral?
MCDONOUGH: Well, look, we — my job is to worry, George, so I worry every day about a lot of different things. But I think what the next president is going to find when they come in here is that that climate deal united the world for the first time on one of the major challenges we face. On the Iran deal, Iran now does not have a nuclear weapon and has no — if we get all these steps now in the next several weeks ironed, that they have to carry out to get to what we call implementation day, all their paths to a nuclear bomb will be blocked. So we feel really good about these deals, and we think the president’s going to come in here and pick them up where we leave them.