On a call with reporters Tuesday afternoon, senior Trump administration officials described the negotiation process leading up to the president’s decision to strike Iran. 

The president for weeks has been insisting that Iran needed to reach a deal to abandon its nuclear program. But one senior Trump administration official on the call said “it was very clear” the Iranian regime was trying to get the U.S. into a long, drawn-out process. The officials only agreed to speak with reporters on the condition of anonymity. 

“We really thought that they would show real movement toward creating a real deal, but all we got were games and tricks and denials,” one official said.

“It was very clear they were just trying to buy time in order to preserve whatever they could to get past the term of President Trump, in order to, you know, get to a nuclear weapon,” the official added.

After the latest negotiations concluded in Geneva, the officials said they told the president it would take months to reach a deal that may not even be satisfactory.

“So basically, we came back to the president, we said, ‘Look, if you want us to make, you know, a deal, like an Obama kind of deal, maybe it would be an Obama-plus deal, we could probably get one done,” the same official said. “It would take months.”

“These guys definitely were not looking to make a quick deal,” the official continued. “And if you’re asking us at the end of the day if we’re going to look at you and say we’ve actually solved the issue, I said look, it’s going to take a lot for us to get there. Because they’re basically playing games with us all over the place. It’s just very, very slippery. So we said, ‘Look, if you decide that you want to do diplomacy, we’ll go, we’ll push as hard as possible, we’ll get in the room, we’ll fight for every point that we can.’ But these guys, they just really were showing that they didn’t want to, that they weren’t willing to make the type of deal that President Trump would have been satisfied with.”