President Donald Trump sent out a tweet on Tuesday morning criticizing former President Barack Obama for allegedly giving citizenship to Iranians as part of the Iranian nuclear deal.
Trump was referring to a report on Fox News that cited Iran’s Etemad newspaper in which a senior cleric and member of parliament claimed that the Obama administration gave citizenship to 2,500 Iranians, including family members of government officials, while negotiating the Iran nuclear deal.
The member of parliament, Hojjat al-Islam Mojtaba Zolnour, who is chairman of Iran’s parliamentary nuclear committee and a member of its national security and foreign affairs committee, claimed the Obama administration did it as a favor to senior Iranian officials linked to President Hassan Rouhani and that the move sparked a competition among Iranian officials over whose children would benefit from it.
The Department of Homeland Security declined to comment on the report, and a State Department spokesperson said: "We’re not going to comment on every statement by an Iranian official."
Department for Homeland Security figures show that 13,114 Iranians received green cards in 2015, the year of the Iranian nuclear deal, while another 10,344 were naturalized that same year. As the Daily Mail pointed out, these figures were not much different to the numbers of Iranians granted a green card the following year, 13,298, and 9,507 naturalized.
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