Radio host Mark Levin on Tuesday credited Washington Free Beacon senior writer Adam Kredo for reporting on the contentions inside the Trump administration over the Iran nuclear deal.
"It was actually the Washington Free Beacon and Adam Kredo who broke this, not these other media outlets," Levin said. "He points out that the firing of Tillerson follows months of infighting between the State Department and the White House over Tillerson’s efforts to save the Iran nuclear deal."
Kredo reported that Tillerson’s departure followed an ongoing feud over the Iran deal, in which President Donald Trump demanded the agreement be fixed or scrapped. On Tuesday, he wrote:
The abrupt firing Tuesday of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson follows months of infighting between the State Department and White House over efforts by Tillerson to save the Iran nuclear deal and ignore President Donald Trump's demands that the agreement be fixed or completely scrapped by the United States, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the situation who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon.
In the weeks leading up to Tillerson's departure, he had been spearheading efforts to convince European allies to agree to a range of fixes to the nuclear deal that would address Iran's ongoing ballistic missile program and continued nuclear research.
While Trump had prescribed a range of fixes that he viewed as tightening the deal's flaws, Tillerson recently caved to European pressure to walk back these demands and appease Tehran while preserving the deal, according to these sources. The Free Beacon first disclosed this tension last week in a wide-ranging report.
Levin sharply criticized the Obama administration for how it went about ratifying the nuclear deal.
The radio and television host predicted the Senate will try to delay the appointment of Mike Pompeo, the current director of the Central Intelligence Agency, to take Tillerson’s place. He also praised Pompeo’s work at the CIA.