Report: Ex-Obama Officials Engaged In “Shadow Diplomacy” With Iran To Derail Trump Foreign Policy
The Washington Free Beacon on declassified State Dept. memo: “The document is the firmest proof to date that Obama-era officials were engaged in back-channel efforts…”
Former Obama administration officials held secret talks with the Iranians in a bid to undermine former President Donald Trump’s policy of weakening the Mullah regime and crippling its nuclear weapons program, a recently declassified State Department document shows.
The story, broken by Adam Kredo for the Washington Free Beacon on Thursday, said that Obama officials had an “off-the-record” meeting with the then-Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, at his in New York City residence in an attempt “to handicap a sitting president’s policies.”
The damning revelations, which came to light through a newly-unearthed State Department memo, is the “firmest proof to date that Obama-era officials were engaged in back-channel efforts,” the WFB story noted.
It was great, as always, to be with @JaySekulow and @JordanSekulow discussing the dangerous, unAmerican activities of former Obama officials who sought to undermine our work getting America out of the disastrous Iran deal. https://t.co/dHTYYTkdZx
— Mike Pompeo (@mikepompeo) May 26, 2022
The internal State Department memo, which exposes the secret diplomacy between former Obama officials and the top Iranian envoy, was declassified thanks to a lawsuit filed by the advocacy group American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ). “The document was produced after the ACLJ sued the State Department for records about any secret meetings between Zarif, Kerry, current U.S. Iran-Envoy Robert Malley, and former Obama secretary of energy Ernest Moniz,” the news outlet added.
The Free Beacon reported the content of the declassified memo:
Senior Obama administration officials engaged in a secret meeting with Iran in 2018 as part of an effort to undermine the Trump administration’s diplomatic push to isolate the hardline regime, according to an internal State Department document.
As the Trump administration worked to increase economic pressure on Iran in 2018, a delegation of “U.S. former ambassadors held a secret, “off-the-record” meeting with former Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif at his residence in New York City, according to a State Department memo unearthed this week as part of a lawsuit brought to compel the release of this information. The meeting took place around the same time John Kerry was reported to be working behind-the-scenes with Iranian officials to salvage the 2015 nuclear accord.
The internal memo, which is marked unclassified, details how these former U.S. ambassadors conducted shadow diplomacy with Iran’s top envoy surrounding “nuclear weapons, potential prisoner swaps, [the] Afghanistan withdrawal, and negotiations with the Taliban,” according to the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a legal advocacy group that sued the State Department to obtain the internal memo.
The document is the firmest proof to date that Obama-era officials were engaged in back-channel efforts to keep negotiations with Iran alive, even as former president Donald Trump and his administration worked to isolate the regime, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo told the Free Beacon in exclusive remarks. Pompeo, who was not aware of these meetings while leading the State Department, said the memo corroborates reports from the time about Kerry’s efforts to salvage the 2015 nuclear deal through back-channel powwows with Iranian officials.
“This memo reflects even more than we already knew about former State Department officials continuing on as if they were still in office,” said Pompeo, who is now senior counsel for global affairs at the ACLJ. “Trying, at every turn, to work with the foreign minister for a terrorist regime, Iran, to undermine the very sanctions put in place by America. It’s worse than not knowing when to get off stage. Actively seeking to protect the terrible deal they struck, these former officials—two years after Obama left office—were signaling that Iran should stand firm against America.”
Pompeo said it is startling to learn that members of a former U.S. administration attempted to handicap a sitting president’s policies, describing the disclosure as “bad stuff, dangerous stuff, un-American stuff.” These former officials, he said, “should be ashamed of themselves. Working against their own nation’s policies alongside such a brutal regime.”
As the WFB article rightly notes, the memo corroborates the news reports about former Secretary of State John Kerry’s role in this shadow diplomacy.
Kerry, now the Biden White House climate czar, has repeatedly denied holding talks with the Iranians in order to undermine President Trump’s policy of ‘Maximum Pressure’ against the Mullah regime. In October 2018, Kerry said: “But I’m telling you, I have not met with any Iranians since the President pulled out of the agreement, period.”
However, reports of Kerry and other Obama officials’ secretive parallel diplomacy with Iran have kept surfacing in the media. A February 2021 report in the New York Post said that Kerry and Biden White House’s current Iran envoy, Robert Malley, held talks with the then-Iranian Foreign Zarif in “an apparent bid to undermine the Trump team and lay the groundwork for post-Trump relations.”
When the first reports of Kerry’s dealings with the Iranians came to light, President Trump called for his prosecution under the Logan Act for unauthorized contact with the hostile foreign regime. “John Kerry violated the Logan Act,” Trump said in September 2019. “He’s talking to Iran and has had many meetings and many phone calls and he’s telling them what to do. That is total violation of the Logan Act.”
The mainstream media outlets, like CNN and the Washington Post, ridiculed and condescendingly ‘fact-checked’ Trump for going after Kerry. CNN argued that it was “common for former secretaries of states and diplomats to stay in touch with their counterparts around the world.” the Post accused the president of “wielding the law [Logan Act] to attack his detractors” like Kerry.
Pompeo: Biden White House living in a ‘fantasy world’ on Iran nuke deal (January 2022)
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Comments
This is plain scary.
This is plain treason.
John Kerry has experience in treason. He was the right guy to help out the Iranians.
The crime of Treason requires the country to be in a declared war. Were we in a declared war with Iran, it would be Treason. But it is perhaps verging on sedition.
I know what should be done to them but my comment would be removed.
I can kinda guess… and all I can say is yup.
There will come a time when the people who should do something about this kind of thing continue to not do anything about this kind of thing force people who shouldn’t do something about this kind of thing to actually do something about the people who do this kind of thing.
I agree. And, Biden will refer to it as “you know, the thing!”
What you are saying is a variation on something that I have thought for years: when things finally do bust loose it’s not gonna be some big talker with a four-wheel-drive an NRA stickers. It’s gonna be that one storekeeper who gets hassled by a bureaucrat one too many times. It’s going to be the homebuilder the kids household by the building inspectors over something extremely trivial, just one too many times. It will be the driver with a 40 year clean record gets pulled over just for the sake of ‘let’s mess with the stranger’ in a small town.
One of those types of people will be the one that lights the fuse.
kids household = gets hassled
EDIT FUNCTION PLEASE!
while possible, you’re scenario is one of several have thought about–after all, was a handful of young farmers on the green at concord–another would be in reaction to these bastard’s attitude that they can do whatever they want as they’re “untouchable”–would not be surprised in the slightest when one our countrymen decides that these bastards are no longer “untouchable”
I said 20 years ago that someday we would see Carl Drega as a trendsetter– i just didn’t think the trend would take this long to catch on.
For better or worse, it hasn’t caught on = yet.
So, It’s okay for out-of-office officials to work with foreign governments to undermine the new President (only if the ones doing the undermining are on the left (aka leftists / progressives / communists) and the new President is Donald Trump ? I seem to remember from somewhere that this is called treason. And no one in the government is pursuing charges for this subversive action ? Haha, of course not. My blood boils over this.
President T G Grizzly would. And, would personally pull the lever on the scaffold trap door.
President T G Grizzly would have a long line of volunteers and all would have big smiles on their faces as they pulled the lever on that trap door multiple times!
Has there ever been a time in the history of our country when so many Traitors have power in high positions? This goes up to everyone in the White
House and way beyond!
Johnson and Nixon had some real doozies.
Kennedy brought us the Bay of Pigs, Johnson Vietnam. Nixon provided price controls and took us off the Silver standard. Late 1960s to late 1970s was a pretty awful 15 year span.
Commo: John F Kennedy was an atrocious president.
But, I was into my early teens when he was assassinated. That was a time when the United States could do anything. Anything we set our mind to, we could do. It was a time of “America, yes!“. It was not a time of “America, we apologize.” The transistor, color television in the price range of most Americans. An incredible number of good quality, and fast automobiles.
Homeownership within the reach of single income families.
Schools thst still taught.
In my view, and your opinion made very, the downslide began the day that Linden Johnson was sworn into office. We’re never coming back. Those who look upon Trump is the second Messiah are sadly mistaken. The country is for all practical purposes gone. Nothing short of a Civil War will bring it back.
Johnson and Nixon were DOOZIES themselves! Johnson looked very suspicious in the death of his sister, and his Secret Service detail told tales of his stripping off ALL of his clothes on AF 1 in the presence of his daughters. He was beyond corrupt and very likely had a hand in JFK’s death. Not a fan of JFK, but when his brain become confetti on that fateful day, The Globalists got away with slaughtering a sitting president and it went downhill from there.
Nixon wasn’t nearly as bad, but had horrible social skills and was odd at best. His gaffes were legendary.
Chief – As part of the price controls Nixon took us completely off the Gold Standard by ending the ability to convert US dollars to gold from the US Treasury. His administration saw the increasing inflation and predicted a run on gold as long as the inflated USD could be converted to gold. I’m no longer sure but I seem to recollect the fixed conversion rate was still in effect and gold was held to $35,00 per ounce,
Some years ago there was an individual whose crimes against the country were so egregious, they hung him twice. I think Kerry would qualify.
Sedition by any other definition.
“Commo: John F Kennedy was an atrocious president.”
*****
After JFK’s death more details of his medical conditions became available. The combination of Adrenal insufficiency and his severe back pain made him marginally functional. He was receiving chronic Barbiturates for sleep, Opiates for pain and Amphetamines to keep him going during the day. He was in a severe Adrenal insufficiency situation during the Vienna Summit with Khrushchev and JFK said: “”He beat the hell out of me”. To respond to USSR’s Berlin Wall, Missiles in Cuba, etc., Kennedy said:””Now we have a problem making our power credible and Vietnam looks like the place.”
I suspect that RFK was acting as the day to day President.
Yes, a lot of people think JFK was a playboy that always had a tan. Addison disease causes the hyperpigmentation “bronzing” of the skin that was attributed to his “tan”.
We had to duplex in Los Angeles back around that time. The man upstairs had Addison’s disease. Now that you mention it he always had a great tan.
This is what, the 3rd? 4th? Time that this has happened.
That idiot Carter ‘negotiated’ with North Korea multiple times despite NEITHER party having the slightest respect for his crap.
Obama told Iran NOT to cut a deal with Bush before the election because he’d give them a better one.
Kerry was caught ‘negotiating’ with Iran multiple times while Trump was in office.
They do it because they know there are no consequences for doing it. The weak-kneed RINOs will never hold them accountable.
Something about Senators from Massachusetts, Kennedy, the lady killer, pulled the same crap a while back.
Such indefensible, brazen, lawless, subversive and morally contemptible dhimmitude from the usual vile Dhimmi-crats. Never missing an opportunity to whitewash and enable the malignant behavior of the Muslim supremacists/terrorists who are Iran’s despots.