Steve Witkoff, the special envoy to the Middle East who President Donald Trump tasked with negotiating a deal with Iran, does not sound very much like a diplomat lately.

"There's almost no stopping them, they have an endless supply of [enriched uranium]," Witkoff told Sean Hannity the day the war began. "They thought they could strong-arm us. ... It was very, very clear that it was — it was going to be impossible, probably by the second meeting."

"They bragged about having 60% enriched fuel, enough for 11 bombs," he told reporters seven days into the conflict. "They told me and Jared, 'We're not going to give you diplomatically what you couldn't take militarily.' So you know, I think they're gonna need a change of attitude."

"In a year, if you had someone who didn't have the courage to do this action, you'd have 30 or 40 nuclear bombs," he said in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday.

These are just some of the public statements that have sparked serious questions about Witkoff's role in the outbreak of war. Witkoff and his co-negotiator, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, reportedly told the White House on the eve of the campaign that Iran was simply using talks to buy time — a conclusion that factored into Trump's decision to greenlight the operation, according to at least three separate reports.

Trump himself publicly claimed that the pair had helped persuade him to go to war. That decision came on the back of a months-long pressure campaign from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, one that was coordinated with pro-war Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and urged on by a coterie of longtime influential hawks, like Hannity and Mark Levin.

Witkoff's statements haven't just raised eyebrows for their oddly bellicose nature. Several experts and foreign officials have also taken issue with Witkoff and Kushner's apparent ignorance of the technical issues involved.

Omani foreign minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, a mediator in the talks, made the unusual move of urgently flying to Washington after the talks, to tell both the White House and the American public that, contrary to Wiktoff and Kushner's nay-saying, Iran had made concessions that went well beyond President Barack Obama's 2015 nuclear deal.

Arms Control Association president Daryl Kimball told reporter Laura Rozen that, based on Trump officials' on-the-record briefing about the failure of the talks, the duo appeared to have fatally misunderstood a series of basic technical and historical matters involved in the talks. While Witkoff and Kushner viewed Iran's insistence on continuing to use 20% enriched uranium at the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR) as a red flag, there is no evidence the reactor was being used, or even could be used, to make a bomb, nuclear experts told MS NOW.