Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's revelations about Iran's continuing nuclear program show a "deeply troubling" pattern of behavior that has gone on for decades, White House Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said Tuesday.
"They demonstrate that Iran had a much more advanced clandestine attempt to attain nuclear weapons that dates back decades," Shah told Fox News' "America's Newsroom." They "lied about it to international inspectors and the global community and to the Obama administration when they were negotiating the Iran nuclear deal in 2015."
That demonstrates that the bad faith in the country's nuclear program is "far more advanced than we ever understood, but they could now comply with the terms of this Iran nuclear deal and be prepared just in a few short years to build not just one nuclear warhead and bomb but a full arsenal of nuclear weapons, which is a danger to the entire civilized world," said Shah.
President Donald Trump will decide in the near future about whether to pull the United States out of the nuclear deal, with a deadline of May 12 looming, but he has been "very clear about his approach" to the deal, said Shah.
"It was the worst negotiated deal in the history of modern time by this government. It did not stop Iran's nuclear weapons program and did not verify, as we see from the latest development, it did not have a clandestine program and sets the stage for a more advanced program in the future," Shah said.
Iran, he continued, did not show good faith in its negotiations with the international community, and can't be trusted.
Shah said that if Trump does pull out of the agreement, it will send a message to North Korea that the United States means business.
"The United States and the president want to secure the complete, irreversible and verifiable denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, and to allow for inspections and verifiable mechanisms to ensure it occurs," he said. "Our maximum pressure campaign on North Korea will not relent until we're able to secure a deal that actually establishes the principles that we want."
Meanwhile, there are a number of venues being considered for Trump's upcoming meeting with North Korea, including Trump's idea that the meeting happen in the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas, said Shah.
"I think the president demonstrated yesterday where he would like for this to happen but there are a number of concerns and mitigating factors," he said. "There are pros and cons to a number of sites. Sometime soon we'll have an announcement. The president said a number of weeks from now is what our goal is. We won't let the timing dictate the process itself. These negotiations are ongoing."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.