President Barack Obama said Saturday that partisan wrangling over nuclear negotiations with Iran and on other foreign policy matters had gone too far.

“It needs to stop,” he declared during a news conference at the close of the Summit of the Americas in Panama City.

He said that when he hears some members of Congress, like Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, suggest that Secretary of State John Kerry “is somehow less trustworthy in the interpretation of what’s in a political agreement than the supreme leader of Iran, that’s an indication of the degree to which partisanship has crossed all boundaries.”

“We saw this with the letter sent by the 47 senators, who communicate directly to the supreme leader of Iran — the person that they say can’t be trusted at all — warning him not to trust the United States government,” Obama added.

The president said he was still “absolutely positive” that the framework agreement is the best way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. And he added that if the final negotiations do not produce a tough enough agreement, the U.S. can back away from it.

He said that instead of working to make the nuclear deal better, Republican critics seemed out to sink it.

McCain last week said that comments by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, suggested Iran and the Obama administration were on different pages. He called the supreme leader’s suggestion that Iran would not allow unlimited inspections “a major setback,” adding that it was Khamenei, not Iran’s president or foreign minister, who really calls the shots in Iran.

On Saturday, McCain returned Obama’s criticism, arguing that the discrepancies between the U.S. and Iranian versions of the deal extended to inspections, sanctions relief and other key issues.

“It is undeniable that the version of the nuclear agreement outlined by the Obama administration is far different from the one described by Iran’s supreme leader,” McCain said in a statement.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is set to debate and begin voting Tuesday on amendments to legislation calling for Congress to have a say on the nuclear agreement.

Iran and six world powers have set a June 30 deadline to work out their disagreements on a nuclear accord, though Khamenei said Thursday that it would not be “the end of the world” if that deadline were extended.

Iran and the P5+1 nations — permanent U.N. Security Council members Britain, France, Russia, China and the United States, plus Germany — reached the framework agreement for an accord earlier this month.  The U.S. and Iran have released their own bullet-point interpretations of the framework agreement, since officials said they could not agree on a comprehensive document.

The U.S. government and many of its allies believe Iran’s nuclear program is aimed at producing a weapon, despite Iran’s insistence that the program is intended to serve civilian energy purposes only.

Some information for this report came from AP.
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