Three U.S. residents – Shahab Dalili, Jamshid Sharmahd and Afshin Sheikholeslami Vatani – are classified as U.S. nationals, according to the Levinson Act, said legal experts, and are not part of Biden’s deal.

The Levinson Act defines a “United States national” as a “lawful permanent resident with significant ties to the United States.” According to the State Department, the definition applies to non-U.S. citizens.

The son of Dalili, Darian, who lives in Virginia, told Fox News Digital last week, “My father and I both were on hunger strike for 4 days from Saturday noon until last night. He wasn’t going to end it unless I did. Out of concern for his health and calls from family members and the Iranian-American community, I ended it.”

In a text message to Fox News Digital, Darian said the Biden administration abandoned his father.

“They have included two unnamed prisoners in this deal with Iran who have been there for only a matter of months and have excluded him who’s been there for seven years and keep saying that they haven’t reached a decision on the unlawful designation matter. How could that take seven years? They have never provided us with an answer on why it is taking so long. We have asked repeatedly,” Darian said.

The clerical regime arrested the now-60-year-old Dalili in 2016 after he attended his father’s funeral in Iran. The Islamic Republic charged him with “communications with a hostile country.”

American counterterrorism experts have long said Iran uses bogus charges against foreign citizens and Iranian dual nationals as part of its hostage policy to extract concessions from the West. The New York Sun first reported extensively on Darian’s protest and the plight of his father. He told the New York Sun that “my father has never been a political figure. He has never done anything political” and was only seized because of his America identity.

The failure to include journalist Sharmahd, who was sentenced to death in February by an opaque Iranian judicial system, in the deal has also raised alarm bells. Sharmahd survived an assassination attempt in California in which an Iranian agent was convicted of the planned murder. He was then kidnapped by the Iranian regime in Dubai in 2020 as part of a business trip.

Speaking from California, Sharmahd’s daughter, Gazelle, told Fox News Digital, “My dad chose the United States as his home, worked hard, followed all the rules, belongs to a family of four generations around him of U.S. citizenship, lived here for 20 years as a tax-paying, law-abiding resident and would already have his citizenship if it wasn’t for the terrorists and qualifies as a U.S. national under the Levinson law. How heartless can you be to leave such a man in the hands of his kidnappers and say, ‘Oh well, let Germany handle it.”

Gazelle was responding to a comment made by principal deputy State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel at a press briefing last week that was sent to Fox News Digital by the State Department.

“So Mr. Sharmahd is a German citizen, and I will leave it to our partners in Germany to speak to his situation. What I can say is that the Iranian regime’s treatment of Mr. Sharmahd has been reprehensible. He has been sentenced to death after a legal proceeding that has been widely criticized as a sham trial. And we condemn this kind of treatment in the strongest of terms,” said Patel.

Gazelle, who met with Darian Dalili last week by the State Department, fired back at Patel’s statement, “This is disgusting, inhumane and illegal. The State Department does not only have a moral but also a legal duty to save my dad, especially in a situation where he could face imminent execution if he is left behind.”…