Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz addresses a rally of Iranian dissidents on Monday. Photo: YouTube Screenshot

The Obama administration, and the congressional allies who supported the Iran nuclear deal, filibustered dissenting lawmakers to stymie debate, because they realized the U.S. is “committing a crime,” international law expert Alan Dershowitz told an audience on Monday.

Speaking to a crowd of Iranian dissident activists, Dershowitz took President Barack Obama to task over the nuclear agreement: “[Obama] realizes that what the United States is doing today amounts essentially to a crime. What is that crime? That crime, and you’re all familiar with it … that crime is providing material support to terrorism,” said Dershowitz.

“What does this deal do? It provides tens of billions, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars of material support for terrorism. Of every dollar that the Iranians will get, much of it will go to repressing dissent within Iran; the rest of it will go to encouraging terrorism around the Middle East and around the world,” he said.

While the majority of lawmakers in Congress rejected the nuclear deal, supporters were able to successfully filibuster a resolution rejecting the agreement from ever reaching the president’s desk. Dershowitz added that Republicans were “tricked” into passing the Corker bill, which allowed Obama to lift sanctions against Iran unless both houses of Congress were able to muster a two-thirds majority rejecting the nuclear deal.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, meanwhile, hailed the triumph of diplomacy over war on Monday, during his address to the opening U.N. General Assembly, and touted his country’s willingness to cooperate in tackling region-wide terrorism, specifically in Syria and Yemen — two countries embroiled in years-long civil conflicts involving armed groups with support from Tehran.

Critics of the nuclear deal allege that Iran will use the windfall cash — due to be released to Tehran from escrow accounts locked down under the international sanctions regime — to support terrorist groups, among them Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Houthi rebels in Yemen and others. In fact, Iran’s tacit and direct support for some of these groups goes back decades.

Decrying the years of international sanctions, Rouhani on Monday reiterated Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s oft-repeated claim that his country never sought nuclear weapons.

Obama administration officials allege that the nuclear accord effectively staves off the prospect of another Middle East war. They claim that it blocks all of Iran’s pathways to a nuclear bomb for at least a decade, at which point some provisions of the agreement, such as the limits on enrichment research and development, begin to expire.

They say that while the deal addresses Iran’s nuclear program, the U.S. is still willing to cooperate more closely with its traditional Middle East allies — Israel, the Gulf Arab states, Jordan and others — to contain Iranian influence in the Middle East and its support for regional proxies like Hezbollah.

Watch a video of Dershowitz’s remarks below: