Rick Santorum: Obama sacrificing U.S. security to ‘justify’ Nobel Prize

Former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania says President Obama, in trying to negotiate a deal on Iran’s nuclear program, is sacrificing the security of the United States in order to justify the president’s 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

Mr. Santorum said he was “very grateful” Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu had the “courage” to come to address Congress about Iran and that the leaders of the House and Senate invited him to come.

“For a long time what the Obama administration was doing in this negotiation was being hidden from the American public,” Mr. Santorum said during a recent appearance on the “Piscopo in the Morning” show on AM970 in audio flagged by BuzzFeed. “This put a spotlight on the fact that Barack Obama is sacrificing the security of our country in order to justify his Nobel Peace Prize that he got before he did anything.

“That to me is a real tragedy, that you have the president of United States who is gonna put Iran on a path to a nuclear weapon either in the short term — which I believe is the case because any kind of paper agreement by a regime that has never kept a promise on any international agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on,” Mr. Santorum said. “But even if you agree that he is going to — that they’ll live up to the agreement, by the end of the agreement they’ll be in a position where they can be a nuclear power and that to me is completely unacceptable and I’m so glad that the prime minister came here and laid that out to the American people.”

White House press secretary Joshua Earnest said Monday that a deal over Iran’s nuclear program would include essentially shutting down every path the country has to a nuclear weapon and allowing intrusive inspections to verify compliance.

“And if that’s not something that Iran is able to agree to after more than a year of negotiations, then yes, the president and our international partners will walk away,” Mr. Earnest said. “And we’ll seek to ratchet up the pressure on the Iranians.”

Mr. Santorum, who won the Iowa caucuses in the 2012 GOP presidential nominating contest, is also in the process of staffing up in the early state ahead of another possible White House run. It was announced Monday that state Rep. Walt Rogers will serve as the Iowa chairman for Mr. Santorum’s Patriot Voices group.