Carly Fiorina has been resolute about her view of the Iran nuclear deal:
it stinks.
"I've never negotiated an Iran nuclear deal, but I've negotiated a lot of high-stakes deals, and there are a couple of rules, and every rule has been broken.”
She's also called lifting the Iran sanctions a "dangerous development."
But one place she's been all over the map on is her knowledge of whether Hewlett-Packard did business in Iran illegally while she was serving as its CEO from 1999 to 2005, reports Josh Rogin:
HP’s unusual omnipresence inside Iran was first reported in 2008 by the Boston Globe, which discovered that in 1997 the company struck up a partnership with a new Indian company in Dubai called Redington Gulf. The partnership was so successful distributing in Iran that HP printers were No. 1 there, with 41 percent of the market share by 2007.
All U.S. companies were banned from exporting to Iran in 1995, when President Bill Clinton issued two executive orders tightening sanctions on Iran in response to Iran’s support for international terrorism and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. If HP executives knew about what the Dubai-based distributor was doing, they would have been breaking U.S. law.
After being contacted by the Securities and Exchange Commission about this violation, HP executives argued that its products were reaching the Dubai distributor via a foreign subsidiary in the Netherlands, so technically it wasn't breaking the law. But during Fiorina's 2010 Senate bid against Barbara Boxer, her spokeswoman claimed Fiorina had no knowledge of the sales:
"It is illegal for American companies to do business in Iran," her spokeswoman, Beth Miller, said at the time. "To her knowledge, during her tenure, HP never did business in Iran and fully complied with all U.S. sanctions and laws." [...]
Later on in her 2010 campaign, Fiorina partially admitted HP’s business in Iran and defended it in an interview with Lady Globes magazine, on the basis that technology could open up Iran to the world. She said that the Iran business was “distributing printer ink,” which she said that was permitted in export law.
Just guessing Carly won't be citing HP's Iran deal as an example of what she's capable of negotiating with foreign entities.