Former Secretary of State John Kerry’s meetings with Iranian officials are “unseemly and unprecedented,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a Friday rebuke.
“It’s inconsistent with what the foreign policy of the United States is, as directed by this president, and it’s beyond inappropriate,” Pompeo told reporters at the State Department.
Kerry confirmed that he has met with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif several times since his departure from office; the two played a leading role in the negotiation of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Pompeo, who has spearheaded the Trump administration’s diplomacy through the exit from the pact and the renewal of U.S. sanctions on the regime, declined to say if he agrees with President Trump’s statement that the meetings are illegal.
[More: Trump accuses John Kerry of undercutting administration’s ‘great work’]
“I’ll leave the legal determinations to others, but what Secretary Kerry has done is unseemly and unprecedented,” Pompeo said.
He broadened the rebuke to apply to former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and former Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, one of the top negotiators of the Iran deal. The former Kansas Republican lawmaker recalled seeing “the troika” at the Munich Security Conference.
“I am confident that they met with their troika counterparts,” he said. “I wasn’t in the meeting, but I am reasonably confident that he was not there in support of U.S. policy.”
Kerry has denied “coaching” Iran on how to respond to Trump’s policy moves.
“Every secretary of state, former secretary of state, continues to meet with foreign leaders, goes to security conferences, goes around the world,” he told Fox News’ Dana Perino. “And we have conversations with people about the state of affairs in the world in order to understand them. I think everybody in the world is sitting around and talking about waiting out President Trump.”
But Pompeo maintained that Kerry crossed a line. “Actively undermining U.S. policy as a former secretary of state is literally unheard of,” he said.
[Opinion: John Kerry deserves jail for secret Iran diplomacy]
