Ex-CIA Chief: Netanyahu's Iran Nukes Announcement "Old News."
BURNETT: New tonight, what's going on in Iran? The top defense experts and lawmakers, some of them downplaying the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's dramatic presentation, the one where he claimed that there are new documents, hundreds of thousands that are obtained by Israeli intelligence, which prove Iran is lying about its nuclear program and it has no plans to honor its end of the nuclear deal. Here is Netanyahu and then the reaction.</s>BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER: Tonight, we are going to reveal new and conclusive proof of the secret nuclear weapons program that Iran has been hiding for years from the international community. A hundred thousand files right here prove that they lied.</s>MICHAEL HAYDEN, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: I think this is fundamentally old news.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think there's actually less here than meets the eye.</s>SEN. BOB CORKER (R), TENNESSEE: It's nothing new. This is really not ground breaking. We've known of this for some time.</s>BURNETT: So, OUTFRONT now, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer. And, Ambassador Dermer, you heard that -- old news, less than meets the eye, nothing new from a former NATO commander, CIA director, and, of course, Senator Corker. Why are you calling this a, quote, smoking bomb?</s>AMB. RON DERMER, ISRAEL'S AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED STATES: Well, first of all, the information is new. They don't have it. I respect all of those people, but they haven't seen the information. The only agency that has seen the information is the U.S. intelligence agency, the CIA. As of last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was the director of the CIA, and he said himself that this is new information. It was new to us. I don't know if Senator Corker or the other people who you showed on screen, if they had this information, it was certainly new to Israeli intelligence. It's a massive amount of information. We knew that Iran had a military nuclear program but we did not know the extent of it. And there are many things that the prime minister didn't show. Basically he's showing 30 PowerPoint slides. We have 100,000 documents, we have videos, a file the likes of which we've never seen. And when it comes into the hands of the other intelligence agencies like the United Kingdom and France and Germany and the IAEA, they will say that the information is new, I have no doubt about that. So, I think people should reserve judgment, let the experts look at the information. It takes many weeks to go through it because first you've got to know Farsi, because it's their documents.</s>BURNETT: In Farsi, yes.</s>DERMER: And the other thing is you need to have the technical expertise. The prime minister actually showed some new things for people who are really in the weeds on this stuff, but it's new and very damning information that actually shows that Iran falsified all of their presentations to the International Atomic Energy Agency, and you heard the White House say today that the whole deal was based on this lie. And that's because when the IAEA had to sign off on this, in December 2015, Iran basically falsified all those documents. I should point out one other thing regarding a violation.</s>BURNETT: Yes.</s>DERMER: And that is Iran moved this trove of information to this site recently, after the deal was signed. The action of moving this and actually making --</s>BURNETT: OK.</s>DERMER: -- a positive action to hide their program is actually a violation of the</s>JCPOA. BURNETT: So, I actually -- I want to talk to you about that location. But first, you know, the prime minister comes on and shows his 30- slide summary, right? The reality of it is, of course, Ambassador Dermer, we all know he has issued dire warnings before over decades with time frames about the Iranian nuclear program. And the Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif took to Twitter, as you saw, saying Netanyahu is, quote, the boy who can't stop crying wolf on the back of this presentation last night. And here's why.</s>NETANYAHU: The most dangerous of these regimes is Iran. Only the United States can lead this vital international effort to top the nuclearization of terrorist states. But the deadline for obtaining this goal is getting extremely close. When I last stood here, I spoke of the consequences of Iran developing nuclear weapons. Now, time is running out. They're very close. They're six months away from being 90 percent of having the rich uranium for an atom bomb.</s>BURNETT: That went back as early as 1996, 22 years ago, and 2012, six months away. And here we are. You're not saying they have one yet.</s>DERMER: Well, all I can tell you is thank god that the prime minister has been prime minister for 12 of those 20 years, because had we done nothing, had your intelligence agencies done nothing over the last 20 years, they would have had a nuclear arsenal a long time ago. And you can invite all the previous heads of the intelligence services, Israeli intelligence, U.S. intelligence services and other intelligence services around the world that did a lot to block Iran's path to the bomb. The problem with this deal, Erin, the fatal flaw and you didn't show that from the prime minister's speech to Congress in 2015 is the deal's restrictions that it puts in place, they're all temporary and they're all automatically removed in a few years. And a lot of people responded --</s>BURNETT: Right.</s>DERMER: -- to what the prime minister said and they actually argued, you know, this just vindicates the need to have restrictions. Frankly, that's an absurd argument. If the restrictions that were in place were permanent restrictions, I can understand that.</s>DERMER: Let me just finish this point. I can understand --</s>BURNETT: They're saying this is the best deal they could get. So, it was either no restrictions and no visibility or some restrictions and some visibility and a delay.</s>DERMER: Or --</s>BURNETT: And that was your choice. It's not a permanent solution.</s>DERMER: No. Or ratchet up pressure on Iran and actually force them to accept the deal that is in U.S. national interests, Israel's national interests and the interests of the parties in the region. I mean, at the time you remember, Erin, people said if we don't do this deal, there's going to be war. Now look at what's happening in the Middle East. There's all the sanctions that were removed, as all the money has flowed into Iran, now you see Iran marching through the Middle East and the aggression of Iran has only increased because of this deal. It's a very dangerous situation that we have in Syria, that we have around us. And it's because of the sanctions relief that came from this deal. The important thing, the fatal flaw of the deal is that the restrictions are temporary.</s>BURNETT: Yes.</s>DERMER: And what Netanyahu showed yesterday is when those restrictions are removed, Iran won't need to sneak in or break into a bomb, they can just walk in, go to those vaults, get the information they have, build a nuclear arsenal and that's very dangerous.</s>BURNETT: I just want to make -- I want to ask you about that but I want to make one point on this, right? I was in Iran as the deal was being negotiated, before it was being negotiated. There were Germans there, there were South Koreans there, there were a lot of people doing things that were not in the spirit of sanctions, whether they were outright in violation or not, right? And the understanding was the U.S. and Israel had lost the rest of the world, right? You weren't going to get that sanctions pressure. It was going to go away anyway, so get a deal while you have some of it. You didn't have the option of full-on sanctions. Do you think you have that now?</s>DERMER: Well, first of all, we definitely had the option. There were crippling sanctions on Iran only for 18 months. The previous administration pulled the rug out from under the sanctions regime and agreed to a bad deal. They should have ratcheted up the pressures and forced Iran to fully dismantle its program which was the position of the international community until 2013. We can restore the crippling sanctions very fast and Iran is a very vulnerable regime. You saw the protests in Iran only a few months ago where the people of Iran are fed up with the regime, they're fed up with the adventurism in the region. And it was a big mistake to make this deal and we hope that President Trump will make the right choice moving forward. The right choice for America, for Israel and for the peace of the world.</s>BURNETT: I want to give you a chance to respond to John Kerry, of course, the American who was arguably, inarguably I would say, the chief negotiator for the U.S. side for this deal. He tweeted, it's worth remembering that the early 2000s when his evidence comes from, referring to Prime Minister Netanyahu's, was the period where the world had no visibility into Iran's program. More and more centrifuges were spinning each month. The world was not united like it is now, there was no negotiating. All of that changed with the JCPOA, which is the Iran deal. Blow up the deal and you're back there tomorrow. Back there tomorrow? That's an acceleration in getting a bomb.</s>DERMER: Look, this deal puts us on cruise control heading over a cliff. And the people who say the deal is working are basically saying the cruise control is working. And no one is thinking about the cliff when all these restrictions are removed. The inspection regime in Iran, Erin, is a joke. It's not inspectors that found these documents in Tehran. It's Israel's intelligence that was able to obtain them. All the inspectors do is they look under the keys, under the light of the lamp post. But all the dark places in Iran they don't see and all the inspectors are doing are going into places where Iran is allowing them to go. That's not where they're going to have their secret facilities.</s>BURNETT: And, Ambassador, quickly before we go, you had agents, Mossad agents who are in that warehouse in Tehran?</s>DERMER: I'm not going to comment at all on the operation. I think it's a great coup for Israeli intelligence, but it also tells you how much we failed in the past to have this information. Why didn't we have this three years ago? And I would not assume, Erin, that what we have is everything that Iran has.</s>BURNETT: All right. Ambassador Dermer, thank you.</s>DERMER: Thank you.</s>BURNETT: And next, as Trump and Kim prepare to meet, what do people inside North Korea think? An exclusive, unprecedented look.