The Biden-Harris administration is in secret communications with Iran, just weeks before a presidential election in which the Republican candidate is attacking President Biden and Vice President Harris for high gas prices and the risk of war.

Ostensibly the communications are to warn Iran against additional attacks on Israel. Yet usually when there is a stick, there is also a carrot. Voters deserve to know — and congressional Republicans could ask — whether the Biden administration is also offering Iran a post-election reward for keeping the Middle East quiet, and gas prices low, between now and the election.

Disentangling American national security interests and Ms. Harris’s political interests is, at this point, a complicated — verging on impossible — task. The most important way they diverge is timing. An Iranian attack on Israel and higher gas prices would be bad for America at any juncture, but it’d be much worse for Ms. Harris before Election Day than afterward. 

If there’s no reward being offered to Iran, and no communication about delaying the timing of an attack until after the election, the Biden-Harris administration could easily dispel those suspicions by being transparent about the communications. Instead, the messages to Iran have been cloaked in secrecy, with even anonymous White House officials refusing to level fully with the press about the content.

On the afternoon of August 8, during a White House-organized background press call with a senior administration official, Felicia Schwartz of the Financial Times asked: “I’m wondering what the gist of the messages you’ve passed to Iran to avoid a massive retaliation is.”

“On the Iranians, I am not going to talk about our messaging to the Iranians,” the senior administration official  replied. Then the official said, “We’re doing all we can to deter such an attack, to defeat an attack if it comes, and also to demonstrate to Iran there’s a better path forward here than a military attack.”

The track record for recent Democratic administrations is that “better path forward” is a euphemism for hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief, even planeloads of American cash, headed for Iran. 

It’s not only the Democrats who have an appetite for such a negotiated agreement with Iran’s religious dictatorship, led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. President Trump, who withdrew from the Obama-Biden-Kerry Iran nuclear deal in his first term, said at his August 8 press conference, “I woulda had a deal done with Iran within one week after the election.” 

In October 2020, Trump promised that if he were re-elected, we would “have a great deal with Iran within one month.”

The pressure to deliver foreign policy victories before an approaching election deadline can sometimes bear impressive fruit. Trump hosted a signing ceremony for the Abraham Accords on September 15, 2020.  Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris, on the other hand, are pushing what a former aide to Vice President Cheney, David Wurmser, describes as “an American comprehensive regional ceasefire plan … that appears to grant Iran a total strategic victory.”

“It leaves Hamas surviving and able to resurrect, Hizballah on Israel’s border, and is anchored to a U.S.-Iran agreement that codifies the condominium,” Mr. Wurmser says in a social media post.

If Israel and its American friends thought they had a hard time stopping the previous Iran nuclear deal, imagine how even more difficult this one would be if it is packaged along with a  premature cease-fire in Gaza and a promised hostage release. Prime Minister Netanyahu might think he can wait it out until a Trump administration, but he might also figure he’ll get a better deal from Mr. Biden and Secretary Blinken than from a President Harris.

If House Republicans need a template for inquiring on these matters, here are some snippets of language they might draw from: “solicited the interference of a foreign government … in the … United States Presidential election … used the powers of the Presidency in a manner that compromised the national security of the United States and undermined the integrity of the United States democratic process … betrayed the Nation by abusing his high office to enlist a foreign power in corrupting democratic elections.”

That’s from the resolution House Democrats used in 2019 to impeach President Trump. A second impeachment count had to do with his reluctance to give Congress full access to his national security-related communications. If the issue heats up, perhaps Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris can try to dispel it by insisting that their pre-election messages to Iran have been “perfect.”