Vice President JD Vance confirmed Monday that negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program collapsed after U.S. officials concluded Tehran’s claims did not ‘pass the smell test,’ prompting President Donald Trump to authorize Operation Epic Fury.

Speaking on ‘Jesse Watters Primetime,’ Vance said U.S. envoys — including Steve Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Jared Kushner — had conducted rounds of ‘deliberate’ talks in Geneva with the Iranian delegation.

The discussions were aimed at curbing Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief and averting a broader conflict, he said, but ultimately broke down.

‘But the Iranians would come back to us, and they’d say, ‘Well, you know, having enrichment for civilian purposes, for energy purposes, is a matter of national pride,’’ Vance said.

‘And so we would say, ‘OK, that’s interesting, but why are you building your enrichment facilities 70 feet underground? And why are you enriching to a level that’s way beyond civilian enrichment and is only useful if your goal is to build a nuclear bomb?’’ he said.

‘Nobody objects to the Iranians being able to build medical isotopes; the objection is these enrichment facilities that are only useful for building a nuclear weapon,’ Vance clarified.

‘It just doesn’t pass the smell test for you to say that you want enrichment for medical isotopes, while at the same time trying to build a facility 70 to 80 feet underground,’ he explained.

Vance spoke as Operation Epic Fury ended its third day. Launched on Feb. 28, U.S. and Israeli forces carried out coordinated precision strikes deep inside Iran aimed at crippling Tehran’s missile arsenal and nuclear infrastructure.

A key issue had been Iran enriching uranium to high levels, including material around 60% purity — a fraction of weapons-grade but far above limits set under the 2015 nuclear deal — keeping international alarm high over proliferation risks.

‘We destroyed Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon during President Trump’s term,’ Vance told Watters. ‘We set them back substantially. But I think the President was looking for the long haul,’ he said.

‘Trump was looking for Iran to make a significant long-term commitment that they would never build a nuclear weapon, that they would not pursue the ability to be on the brink of a nuclear weapon.’

‘He wanted to make sure that Iran could never have a nuclear weapon, and that would require fundamentally a change in mindset from the Iranian regime.’

‘The president is not going to rest until he accomplishes that all-important objective of ensuring that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon, not just for the next few years, not just because we obliterated Fordow or some other enrichment facility.’

‘There’s just no way that Donald Trump is going to allow this country to get into a multiyear conflict with no clear end in sight and no clear objective,’ Vance added while describing that the administration would prefer to see ‘a friendly regime in Iran, a stable country, a country that’s willing to work with the United States.’

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Most congressional precedents emanate from Capitol Hill.

Most presidential precedents emerge from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

But a precedent which may echo around the halls of Congress and the White House for years materialized in recent days in the snow-covered, wooded village of Chappaqua, New York.

That’s where former President Bill Clinton testified under subpoena to the House Oversight Committee as part of its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Lawmakers said the panel’s ability to compel testimony from a former president could establish a new precedent going forward — including in matters involving President Trump and the Epstein files.

According to congressional historians, never before has a congressional committee deposed a former president. It was rare enough to have former First Lady and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testify the day before. Republicans noted that former President Clinton had previously acknowledged knowing Epstein and traveling on trips that included him.

‘I do not recall ever encountering Mr. Epstein. I never flew on his plane or visited his island, homes or offices,’ said Hillary Clinton after nearly six hours of closed-door testimony before the panel.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., said Hillary Clinton declared ‘‘You’ll have to ask my husband,’’ more than ‘a dozen’ times during her deposition ahead of Bill Clinton’s the following day.

There are no accusations of wrongdoing against either of the Clintons in connection with Epstein. But the former president’s past ties to Jeffrey Epstein have spurred questions from lawmakers.

‘It’s very difficult to get people in for these depositions of great power and great wealth,’ said Comer. ‘It took seven months, seven months to get the Clintons in here. But we’ve got them in here.’

‘Here’ was Chappaqua, about an hour north of New York City. The Clintons have resided in Chappaqua since President Clinton left office in 2001 and when Hillary Clinton ran for Senate from New York in 2000. Hillary Clinton served as a senator from New York from 2001 until 2009, when she became President Obama’s first Secretary of State.

More specifically, the ‘here’ for the Clintons’ testimony was not a bland office in the Rayburn House Office Building. House members questioned the Clintons at the Chappaqua Performing Arts Center, known locally as ‘ChappPAC,’ a white structure with simple arcades and Greek columns atop a hillside above the Saw Mill River.

The Epstein inquiry is serious, and the unusual venue underscored the extraordinary nature of the proceeding.

Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., appeared to snap a photo of Hillary Clinton during the deposition, then shared it with conservative media outlets.

‘I admire (Hillary Clinton’s) blue suit. So I wanted to capture that for everyone,’ said Boebert outside the venue.

‘Why did you send the picture?’ asked a reporter.

‘Why not?’ retorted Boebert.

‘We are sitting through an incredibly unserious, clown show of a deposition, where Members of Congress and the Republican Party are more concerned about getting their photo op of Secretary Clinton than actually getting to the truth and actually holding anyone accountable,’ charged Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz.

After concluding her testimony, Hillary Clinton told reporters she found the ‘end’ of the deposition to be ‘quite unusual because I started being asked about UFOs and a series of questions about Pizzagate, one of the most vile, bogus conspiracy theories that was propagated on the internet.’

That is a reference to a conspiracy theory that emerged during the 2016 presidential campaign between Hillary Clinton and President Trump. Proponents falsely claimed Democrats operated a child sex trafficking ring out of the Comet Ping Pong pizza shop in Washington. A North Carolina man later drove to Washington, D.C., and fired shots inside the restaurant, telling authorities he was there to rescue children.

Rep. Nancy Mace, R-N.C., asserted that Hillary Clinton was ‘screaming’ at lawmakers during the deposition.

‘She was unhinged,’ said Mace. ‘And I hope that President Clinton is less unhinged today than his wife was yesterday.’

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., emerged from the Chappaqua Performing Arts Center about 90 minutes into former President Clinton’s deposition to speculate about what may have been behind Epstein and his sex trafficking operation. Luna noted she was speaking only for herself and not other members of the committee.

‘It has become very evident even in the last 24 hours in lines of questioning that Jeffrey Epstein was running an intelligence gathering operation,’ said Luna. ‘I do believe it was a honey pot operation.’

Luna added that it was possible a U.S. intelligence ally was involved, though she provided no evidence for the claim.

One of the five agreed-upon areas of questioning for the Clintons was how Epstein used his connections with powerful figures to hide his crimes. That is why individuals such as former President Clinton and President Trump have surfaced in previously released Epstein-related documents.

The presidency is a unique office, and even President Trump expressed some sympathy for Bill Clinton’s appearance before the Oversight Committee.

‘I don’t like seeing him deposed. But they certainly went after me a lot more than that,’ said the president.

When pressed on Friday, President Trump said he was unfamiliar with the Epstein files.

‘I don’t know anything about the Epstein files. I’ve been totally exonerated,’ said President Trump.

Oversight Committee Republicans were asked whether they agreed with that claim.

‘From all the evidence I’ve seen he’s been exonerated for a long time,’ replied Comer.

‘The Epstein victims have exonerated President Trump. This is a trope that you guys are — a rabbit hole you guys are going down. But he’s been exonerated over and over again by Epstein victims,’ said Mace.

But Democrats questioned why the committee sought testimony from former President Clinton and not President Trump.

‘There is a lot of email correspondence that included President Clinton,’ said Comer.

Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the Oversight panel, argued the move set a broader standard.

‘There’s a precedent now,’ said Garcia. ‘We now want President Trump to come in and to testify under oath in front of the Oversight Committee. We want the First Lady, who we know had a relationship as well with Jeffrey Epstein, to come under oath and testify to the Oversight Committee. That is the new precedent that Republicans wanted to set here.’

Garcia added that President Trump ‘has not been exonerated, and we have serious questions for President Trump.’

Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., argued that the committee spoke ‘to the wrong president.’

It is unclear whether the panel will seek testimony from President Trump. Democrats have indicated they would consider doing so if they gain control of the House in the fall midterm elections.

Separation of powers is a key component of America’s constitutional system. Only a handful of presidents have ever testified before Congress — and none had previously been deposed as a former president.

The nation’s history includes small communities that have taken on outsized political significance. Lawmakers and legal observers say Chappaqua could now join that list if presidential testimony before Congress becomes more common.

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After radical students overthrew Iran’s shah in 1979 and took hostages in the U.S. embassy, the Middle Eastern nation became a strident and blood-soaked adversary of what its new Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship has long called the ‘Great Satan.’

Since then, Tehran has sponsored terrorism around the globe, including targeting the U.S. in multiple, high-profile instances. Former Reagan Justice Department Chief of Staff Mark Levin said Sunday there are at least 44 examples of Iran targeting Americans either directly or indirectly.

‘The Iranian-Nazi regime … [has] murdered more than 1,000 Americans [and] relentlessly pursued nuclear weapons to use against us — they are genocidal warmongers,’ said Levin, an author, attorney and Fox News Channel host.

The stage for Iran’s transformation from ally to enemy of the U.S. was set in the 1960s, when Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi began clashing with influential Islamic cleric Ruhollah Khomeini. The monarch infuriated the theocrat by liberalizing the national constitution to allow faiths other than Islam to be sworn into office on holy books of their choice.

Khomeini’s rhetoric from France, where he was exiled, intensified during the period known as the White Revolution, including misogynistic and xenophobic sermons and demands that Pahlavi be ousted.

Early aggression toward the US

With Pahlavi as a U.S.-aligned leader, this marked an early instance of antagonism by proxy. As protests engineered by Khomeini broke out in fall 1978, the shah declared martial law, and military police fired on a massive crowd of protesters.

Pahlavi and Empress Farah Pahlavi soon fled on a ‘vacation’ to Egypt but never returned. By February 1979, Khomeini returned to Tehran with significant sectarian support.

Failed Carter strategy develops into hostage crisis

Carter National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski — the father of ‘Morning Joe’ host Mika Brzezinski — coined the term ‘arc of crisis’ and advanced an ultimately failed ‘Green Belt’ strategy that supported an arc of largely unstable but fundamentalist regimes across the Middle East that were also viewed as oppositional to the Soviet Union.

Brzezinski’s envisioned buffer strategy soon collapsed when Khomeini proved to be just as anti-American as anti-Soviet.

In October 1979, after months of debate over whether to admit him to the U.S. amid the new turmoil in Iran, President Jimmy Carter relented and permitted the cancer-stricken shah to seek medical care in New York.

That November, the group ‘Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line’ stormed the U.S. embassy, beginning 444 days of captivity for 52 American hostages.

The U.S. severed diplomatic ties the following April, and one rescue mission failed and left several U.S. servicemembers dead. The shah died that summer in Egypt, leaving Khomeini in full control of the government.

In what was seen as the final offense to Carter, Iran suddenly released the hostages minutes into President Ronald Reagan’s administration on Jan. 20, 1981.

Lebanon hostage crisis

On July 5, 1982, the years-long saga known as the Lebanon Hostage Crisis began with the systematic abductions of foreigners, including Americans, by Hezbollah and Iranian proxies in the Mideast country, according to United Against a Nuclear Iran.

That group, founded by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former Ambassador Mark Wallace, maintains a comprehensive history of Iranian aggression on its website and is a nonpartisan policy organization formed to combat the threats posed by the Islamic Republic.

During the Lebanon Hostage Crisis, several victims spent years imprisoned by Hezbollah, where they were forced to undergo psychological and medical torture, including CIA Beirut Station Chief William Buckley, who was not related to the National Review founder of the same name. 

Buckley was tortured for months by Dr. Aziz al-Abub, a Lebanese Hezbollah psychiatrist and medical expert who reportedly forced him to take phenothiazines and experimented on him to induce interrogation and make an example of him to the West.

Buckley reportedly died in custody amid these experiments on June 3, 1985.

The CIA later memorialized him on its wall in Langley, Va., and Obama-era Director John Brennan said in a 2014 statement that ‘we remember Bill not for the manner in which he died but for the legacy he left behind. From his time as an Army lieutenant colonel to his tenure with the Agency, Bill inspired those around him to do great things despite often dangerous conditions.’

The agency later caught up with the figurehead of the Hezbollah-linked Islamic Jihad terrorist group — carrying out what the Washington Institute described as a rare contemporary CIA assassination nearly 25 years later.

Imad Mughniyeh’s group had announced Buckley’s execution in October 1985, but the actual date was determined later, with allegations that he died not from execution but from the side effects of the medical torture he endured. Former hostage David Jacobsen told the institute that Buckley was often sick and delirious in his cell and ultimately died ‘drowning in his own lung fluids’ after a bout of torture.

David Dodge, then-president of the American University in Beirut, was also kidnapped for about a year, and U.S. journalist Terry Anderson was held in captivity for more than six years.

Reagan-era bombings and murders of American servicemembers

On April 18, 1983, an Iran-backed group seen as the predecessor to today’s Lebanese Hezbollah bombed the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans.

That October, a suicide truck bomb linked to Iran hit a U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon, killing 241 servicemembers, in what remains the deadliest single day for the Corps since Iwo Jima.

According to the MEMRI translation of Khomeini’s representative to Lebanon, Sayyed Issa Tabatabai’s interview with the IRNA: ‘I quickly went to Lebanon and provided what was needed in order to [carry out] martyrdom operations in the place where the Americans and Israelis were.’ 

He added, ‘The efforts to establish [Hezbollah] started in [Lebanon’s] Baalbek area, where members of [Iran’s] Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) arrived. I had no part in establishing the [political] party [Hezbollah], but God made it possible for me to continue the military activity with the group that had cooperated with us prior to the [Islamic] Revolution’s victory.’

The MEMRI report continued, ‘It is noteworthy that the part of the interview in which Tabatabai acknowledged receiving Khomeini’s fatwa ordering attacks on American and Israeli targets in Lebanon was removed by IRNA from its website shortly after publication. This is apparently because no official representative of Khomeini, the father of the Islamic Republic, or of Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, had ever said that Iran had any involvement in ordering, planning and carrying out the massive bombings in Lebanon against U.S.’

In 1985, Iran-backed Hezbollah hijacked Trans World Airlines (TWA) Flight 847 as it departed Athens. The hijackers collected IDs from the passengers and singled out U.S. Navy Seabee Robert Stethem of Waldorf, Md., mistaking him for a Marine and blaming him for involvement in the Lebanese Civil War.

The hijackers tortured Stethem as they flew to Beirut before shooting him dead, dumping him on the tarmac, and shooting him again.

Operation Praying Mantis

In 1988, the USS Samuel B. Roberts struck an Iranian mine in the Persian Gulf and nearly sank. The Roberts had been escorting Kuwaiti oil tankers as a protective measure.

After the mines were matched to the Iranian ship Ajr, which had been captured by the Americans earlier that year, President Reagan sprang into retaliatory action.

Reagan’s operation destroyed two oil platforms reportedly used as Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) surveillance structures, leading Iran to begin attacking nonmilitary targets.

The mission also claimed two other Iranian ships and was considered the largest naval surface engagement since World War II.

Two Americans died in a helicopter crash during the operation, while dozens of Iranian officers were killed.

Clinton-Bush-Obama era; 9/11

The FBI linked a 1996 attack on an American military housing complex in Saudi Arabia to another Iranian-backed terrorist group.

Hezbollah al-Hejaz was blamed for the Khobar Towers bombing in June of that year, which killed 19 U.S. servicemembers.

In the aftermath of Al Qaeda’s 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole destroyer in Aden, Yemen, American courts found Iran indirectly liable in that it provided support for the terrorists – in part by letting them be trained in Tehran-linked Hezbollah bases in Lebanon.

In 2015, FISA Judge Rudolph Contreras found Iran and Sudan liable, and during the Biden administration. Sudan agreed to settle claims of murdered sailors’ families.

After 9/11, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq, Iran and its proxies were suspected of causing a large portion of American casualties by supplying land mines to the Iraqi Shia insurgents. In 2019, the Department of Defense officially raised its estimate to more than 600 troop casualties directly tied to Iran or its proxies, meaning one in six Iraq War losses were caused by Tehran.

Navy Cmdr. Sean Robertson told the Army Times at the time that ‘these [American] casualties were the result of explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), other improvised explosive devices (IEDs), improvised rocket-assisted munitions (IRAMs), rockets, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), small arms, sniper fire, and other attacks in Iraq.’

During his first term in the White House, President Donald Trump ordered a strike on the IRGC, killing its legendary commander, Qassem Soleimani.

While Iran was not directly implicated as having specific knowledge of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia, it was found to be complicit in facilitating the planned terrorism.

The report, led by former New Jersey Republican Gov. Tom Kean Sr., found a ‘persistence of contacts’ between Iranian officials and Al Qaeda.

Chapter 7 of the report found that Iran at least knew that the terrorists being trained by Hezbollah were going to act against the U.S. and/or Israel. The findings thereby blew apart critics’ claims that the Sunni terror group could get along with its religious archenemy, the Shia who ran Iran.

Tehran border patrol officials also did not stamp passports of Al Qaeda operatives traveling around the region, as the marking would have been flagged upon application for any U.S. visa.

In 2016, hackers linked to the IRGC were indicted by the Justice Department – including one 34-year-old Iranian national who allegedly gained access to the controls of a major dam in Rye Brook, N.Y., near the confluence of Interstate 287 and the New England Thruway.

In 2011, the U.S. also foiled an IRGC plot targeting the homeland, in which a District of Columbia restaurant was to be bombed to kill Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Adel al-Jubeir.

Iranian-born U.S. citizen Manssoor Arbabsiar and Quds Force member Gholam Shakuri were charged in the incident. Arbabsiar was arrested at New york’s JFK Airport and Shakuri remains at large.

A confidential federal source met with Arbabsiar in Mexico that July, where the suspect agreed to pay $100,000 toward a $1.5 million bounty placed on al-Jubeir, according to the Justice Department.

Then-FBI Director Robert Mueller said at the time that the arrests depict the U.S. ‘increased ability … to bring together the intelligence and law enforcement resources necessary to better identify and disrupt those threats, regardless of their origin.’

Biden era

By 2020, Iran was blamed for several recent attacks on commercial oil tankers, and after Trump ordered the killing of Soleimani, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei dispatched ballistic missiles at Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq.

Several dozen U.S. troops were wounded.

After Hamas militants massacred Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, Iran-backed Hamas and Hezbollah launched about 180 attacks on Western forces in the region, including a drone strike on a base in Jordan that killed three Americans.

Trump era: Assassination plot on the president

After an Afghan-born Iranian proxy and two American men were charged with allegedly trying to hunt down and assassinate an Iranian-born American critic of the ayatollah’s regime, the Justice Department disclosed that Trump was also the subject of a similar assassination plot.

Farhad Shakeri, who had spent 14 years in a New York state prison for robbery and made U.S. contacts to create a ‘network of criminal associates’ to ‘supply the IRGC with operatives’ domestically, was allegedly seeking to kill Masih Alinejad — a journalist who often appears on Fox News Channel.

Shakeri remained at large, likely in Iran, as of 2024, but his American counterparts were put on trial in Brooklyn.

Jonathon Loadholt of Staten Island and Carlisle Rivera of Brooklyn allegedly ‘were recruited as part of that network to silence and kill, on U.S. soil, an American journalist who has been a prominent critic of the regime,’ according to then-Attorney General Merrick Garland.

‘We will not stand for the Iranian regime’s attempts to endanger the American people and America’s national security,’ Garland said, as the criminal complaint suggested Shakeri and Rivera first met while serving time.

The two men stalked Alinejad and were also accused of rotating plates on Loadholt’s car to avoid suspicion, while then-FBI Director Christopher Wray mentioned Trump as another target of an Iranian plot in a related statement on the Alinejad case.

Shakeri reportedly spoke to the FBI voluntarily from Iran, where he disclosed efforts to assassinate Trump, according to The New York Times.

Shakeri said he was told to create a plan to kill Trump after an IRGC meeting that October and that, if he could not, the assumption from the militia was that Trump would lose to Kamala Harris and be ‘easier to assassinate’ while out of office.

‘Thanks to the hard work of the FBI, their deadly schemes were disrupted.  We’re committed to using the full resources of the FBI to protect our citizens from Iran or any other adversary who targets Americans,’ Wray said in a statement at the time.

Trump has since warned Iran repeatedly to back down, with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth overseeing 2025 airstrikes on nuclear facilities, and the administration ultimately taking what it described as long-term military action to force regime change.

‘Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime,’ Trump said Saturday.

Fox News Digital’s Benjamin Weinthal contributed to this report.