US President Joe Biden is seen telling a woman during a campaign stop that the Iran nuclear deal is “dead, but we’re not gonna announce it.” Photo: Screenshot

As EU and Iranian representatives met in Jordan on Monday to discuss the possible revival of the 2015 nuclear deal, amateur video posted to social media showed US President Joe Biden telling a woman during a campaign stop that while the deal was “dead,” the US was not going to announce this publicly.

The video of Biden was reportedly filmed at a Nov. 4 midterm elections campaign stop in Oceanside, California.

In the footage, an Iranian woman off-camera is heard asking Biden whether he would announce the death of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the technical name for the 2015 deal — to which the president responded, “no.”

Pressed as to why, Biden answered: “A lot of reasons.”

He went on to say that the JCPOA “is dead, but we’re not gonna announce it.”

Biden’s interlocutor responded, “We just don’t want any deals with the mullahs…They don’t represent us, they’re not our government.”

“Oh, I know they don’t represent you,” Biden replied. “But they have a nuclear weapon that they’ll represent.”

Later at the rally, Biden responded to activists displaying “Free Iran” signs by telling them, “Don’t worry, we’re gonna free Iran. They’re gonna free themselves pretty soon.”

Biden’s comments surfaced as the EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, sat down with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian for what he described as a “necessary meeting…amid deteriorating Iran-EU relations.” Last week, the bloc imposed new sanctions on the Tehran regime in response to its brutal repression of the historic anti-regime protests presently raging in Iran, as well as its supply of drones and other deadly weapons to its Russian ally for use in the invasion of Ukraine.

In a tweet, Borrell said he had told Amirabdollahian that the EU “stressed [the] need to immediately stop military support to Russia and internal repression in Iran. Agreed we must keep communication open and restore JCPOA on basis of Vienna negotiation.” Talks in Vienna aimed at reviving the JCPOA have made little headway after dragging on for more than a year, with US officials periodically dampening expectations of a breakthrough. Last April, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken confessed in a TV interview that he was not “overly optimistic at the prospects of actually getting an agreement to conclusion.”

Meanwhile, anti-regime protests continued across Iran on Monday, with protestors in Tehran chanting “Basij and the IRGC, you are the equivalent of ISIS for us,” directly comparing the regime’s security forces with the Islamist terrorist organization.

Demonstrators also condemned an alleged attack by guards upon inmates at a prison in Karaj, west of Tehran, on Saturday. Human rights advocates reported that at least 100 prisoners were wounded and one killed after guards opened fire on a protest against the transfer of inmates awaiting execution to a separate section.

“Prison officials were planning the execution of four inmates when a number of prisoners started chanting slogans. The protest turned into a confrontation with the intervention of the guards who shot and injured over one hundred,” the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) reported, quoting sources inside the prison.