Not so diplomatic: Witkoff, Kushner, and Trump’s march to war in Iran

Steve Witkoff, the special envoy to the Middle East who President Donald Trump tasked with negotiating a deal with Iran, does not sound very much like a diplomat lately.

“There’s almost no stopping them, they have an endless supply of [enriched uranium],” Witkoff told Sean Hannity the day the war began. “They thought they could strong-arm us. ... It was very, very clear that it was — it was going to be impossible, probably by the second meeting.”

“They bragged about having 60% enriched fuel, enough for 11 bombs,” he told reporters seven days into the conflict. “They told me and Jared, ‘We’re not going to give you diplomatically what you couldn’t take militarily.’ So you know, I think they’re gonna need a change of attitude.”

“In a year, if you had someone who didn't have the courage to do this action, you'd have 30 or 40 nuclear bombs,” he said in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday.

These are just some of the public statements that have sparked serious questions about Witkoff’s role in the outbreak of war. Witkoff and his co-negotiator, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, reportedly told the White House on the eve of the campaign that Iran was simply using talks to buy time — a conclusion that factored into Trump’s decision to greenlight the operation, according to at least three separate reports.

Trump himself publicly claimed that the pair had helped persuade him to go to war. That decision came on the back of a months-long pressure campaign from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, one that was coordinated with pro-war Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and urged on by a coterie of longtime influential hawks, like Hannity and Mark Levin.

Witkoff’s statements haven’t just raised eyebrows for their oddly bellicose nature. Several experts and foreign officials have also taken issue with Witkoff and Kushner’s apparent ignorance of the technical issues involved.

Omani foreign minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, a mediator in the talks, made the unusual move of urgently flying to Washington after the talks, to tell both the White House and the American public that, contrary to Wiktoff and Kushner’s nay-saying, Iran had made concessions that went well beyond President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal.

Arms Control Association president Daryl Kimball told reporter Laura Rozen that, based on Trump officials’ on-the-record briefing about the failure of the talks, the duo appeared to have fatally misunderstood a series of basic technical and historical matters involved in the talks. While Witkoff and Kushner viewed Iran’s insistence on continuing to use 20% enriched uranium at the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR) as a red flag, there is no evidence the reactor was being used, or even could be used, to make a bomb, nuclear experts told MS NOW.

Drawing on these accounts, several observers have concluded that the war may have started because of Witkoff and Kushner’s “lack of nuclear knowledge” and because they “lacked the technical expertise to even understand what the Iranians were offering in negotiations.” Indeed, the Trump administration opted against including nuclear experts in the negotiating team, a fact which reportedly confused the Iranians.

Others privy to the talks have made more serious allegations, directly challenging Witkoff and Kushner’s account of what transpired. Witkoff’s claim that the Iranians had boasted about having enough enriched uranium for 11 nuclear bombs simply never happened, third parties present at the negotiations told MS NOW. One Gulf state diplomat said this claim — which Witkoff framed to Fox News as a veiled threat from the Iranian negotiators — was “inaccurate,” and that the Iranians were instead trying to say “that all of this material can all go away should we have a deal and Iran can be relieved from sanctions.”

A Gulf state diplomat also told the outlet that Witkoff mischaracterized a statement by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director Rafael Grossi. The American envoy claimed that Iran was enriching and stockpiling uranium at the TRR, rather than developing medicinal isotopes — an assertion that “just isn’t true” and that was based on a conversation “taken completely out of context by Mr. Witkoff,” the diplomat said.

This is on top of the fact that both the IAEA, including Grossi himself, and numerous assessments from both U.S. intelligence and outside experts have concluded the opposite of Witkoff’s public claims: that Iran was not close to producing a nuclear bomb, and was not even pursuing one.

As a result, Iranian officials have reportedly come to view Witkoff and Kushner as not merely incompetent, but as having deliberately misled the president. And it’s not just the Iranians. Even non-Iranian parties involved in the talks reportedly didn’t view Witkoff as an honest broker, and a Gulf diplomat previously complained about Witkoff’s “bogus misrepresentation of himself as a ‘man of peace’” during last year’s talks, which similarly saw the Trump administration attack Iran as negotiations were ongoing.

This perception isn’t helped by the pair’s strong ties to Israel, which has long advocated for war with Iran. Witkoff is known as a staunch supporter of Israel. He counts pro-Israel megadonor Miriam Adelson as a “dear friend” and carries a custom pager gifted to him by Netanyahu and senior Mossad officials, in a reference to an operation in which Israel remotely detonated thousands of pagers that allegedly belonged to Hezbollah officials. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Witkoff fundraised massive amounts of money from pro-Israel donors for Trump after President Joe Biden briefly paused bomb shipments to the country.

Kushner, meanwhile, has been steeped in the pro-Israel community his entire life. He counted Netanyahu as a family friend growing up, with the future Israeli prime minister occasionally borrowing the teenager’s bedroom during visits. Kushner reportedly consulted with Netanyahu officials to pen Trump’s 2016 speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and he is both friends with hardline pro-Israel figures and has donated money to illegal West Bank settlement-building.

According to reports, in the lead-up to the war and beyond, Witkoff and Kushner were talking almost every day with Israeli officials, including Netanyahu and the head of the Mossad, and Witkoff’s responsibilities have apparently now widened into coordinating with Israeli leaders on the war effort against Iran.

Given Witkoff and Kushner’s likely involvement in any future diplomatic efforts with Iran, there is an urgent need for Congress and the press to apply more scrutiny to the duo’s role in involving the United States in another Middle East war, one that is rapidly escalating. There is a widespread perception from both commentators and participants in the talks that the pair helped undermine a peaceful resolution because of either incompetence or, worse, deliberate sabotage. Given the war’s financial and human costs to the U.S. public, the American people need to know the truth.