The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other Zionist lobbying groups have tremendous influence on the US government and bribe officials to advance their agenda, says a former intelligence linguist in Florida.

AIPAC and similar Israel advocacy groups are “heavily financed by individuals who are completely involved in the actual surreptitious influencing [of] our political officials and our political environment,” Scott Rickard told Press TV on Saturday.

“The only way to stop that is to hold people accountable for basically treason because this is supposed to be a democracy and individuals are not supposed to be bribing officials,” he added.

Rickard said he confronted Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas who is running for president, with “some real details about Iran” at a recent rally to stop the Iran nuclear agreement. “All he came back with was the catch phrase as saying, ‘Iran was going to annihilate America.’”

AIPAC advocates pro-Israel policies to Congress and the White House, and channels millions of dollars in campaign contributions to candidates for federal office.

The right-wing, Zionist lobbying group accomplishes this through a network of political action committees established throughout the United States by members of its national board of directors.

The group has been accused of being strongly allied with the Likud party in Israel, and the Republican Party in the United States.

It spent millions of dollars to fund a national television advertising campaign to inform the public “about the dangers of the proposed Iran deal.”

“[AIPAC] failed at an attempt that it made a major investment in,” Rickard said. However, he noted that the latest defeat will not “destroy” or “damage” the Israel lobby’s sway in Washington.

Iran and the P5+1 group of countries reached a conclusion on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on July 14 in the Austrian capital of Vienna following days of intensive talks over Tehran’s nuclear program.

On Thursday, Democrats in the US Senate blocked a Republican resolution to reject the nuclear agreement.

Analysts say the move delivered the Obama administration a major foreign policy victory and exposed the decreasing power of the Israel lobby that spent millions of dollars to prevent the accord.