by WorldTribune Staff, September 17, 2018
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blasted former Secretary of State John Kerry for meeting recently with Iran’s foreign minister.
“What @JohnKerry has done by engaging with #Iran’s regime, the world’s top state sponsor of terror, is unseemly, unprecedented, and inconsistent with U.S. foreign policy. The deal failed. Let it go,” Pompeo tweeted on Sept. 15.
Pompeo’s criticism of Kerry’s meetings with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif followed a Sept. 13 tweet from President Donald Trump which said: “John Kerry had illegal meetings with the very hostile Iranian Regime, which can only serve to undercut our great work to the detriment of the American people. He told them to wait out the Trump Administration! Was he registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act? BAD!”
The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires those who represent the interests of foreign powers to disclose such relationships and any related activities and finances.
Pompeo added in a second tweet, referring to the Iran nuclear deal: “#JCPOA didn’t stop all paths for #Iran to develop nuclear weapons, contrary to the way it was sold to the American people.”
Kerry and Zarif were key negotiators of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Kerry told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt last week that he had met with Zarif three or four times since leaving office but not since Pompeo took the job in April.
Asked if he was advising the Iranians on how to deal with the Trump administration, Kerry said: “That’s not my job, and my coaching him would not, you know, that’s not how it works. What I have done is tried to elicit from him (Zarif) what Iran might be willing to do in order to change the dynamic in the Middle East for the better.”
In a statement to The Hill, a spokesperson for Kerry said the former secretary of state “stays in touch with his former counterparts around the world just like every previous secretary of state, and in a long phone conversation with Secretary Pompeo earlier this year he went into great detail about what he had learned about the Iranian’s view. No secrets were kept from this administration.”
The spokesperson added: “There’s nothing unusual, let alone unseemly or inappropriate, about former diplomats meeting with foreign counterparts … What is unseemly and unprecedented is for the podium of the State Department to be hijacked for political theatrics.”
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee told Fox News that Kerry’s meetings with Zarif could “make the case” for a violation of the Logan Act.
“John Kerry is the only guy I know that wants to bring back the Edsel, MySpace, and other failed enterprises,” Huckabee said. “This is why John Kerry really is a joke, but the sad thing is what he’s doing is not funny. What he’s doing is both a violation of the Logan Act … I think he makes the case for actually getting convicted of it. The second is the Foreign Agent Registration Act, or FARA. I think he’s violating both.”
He added that Kerry is “violating” a “sense of protocol” and he “owes the country a big apology” for his meetings.
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