When President Trump took office, he announced the U.S. would withdraw from the John Kerry-negotiated and Barack Obama-approved deal with Iran, contending it would not accomplish the objective of halting the mullah-led regime’s nuclear-weapons program.
Kerry wasn’t pleased with the U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in which the U.S. sent pallets of cash to Iran. But Judicial Watch argued that didn’t give him the authority to work with foreign leaders behind the back of the president to salvage the deal.
Judicial Watch announced Monday it is suing the State Department to obtain copies of documents relevant to Kerry’s “shadow diplomacy.”
Trump announced on May 8, 2018, that the U.S. was withdrawing from the deal.
“In the months preceding the U.S. withdrawal, Kerry reportedly had been on a ‘stealthy yet aggressive mission’ of shadow diplomacy in an attempt to preserve the Iran nuclear deal. Kerry reportedly held meetings and spoke with major players, foreign and domestic, involved in the Iran nuclear agreement who opposed the U.S. withdrawal,” Judicial Watch explained.
“During his personal campaign to salvage the Iran nuclear deal, Kerry is said to have met with Iran Foreign Minister Javad Zarif at the United Nations in New York in late April 2018, their second meeting in two months, to discuss ways of preventing the deal limiting Iran’s nuclear weapons program from falling apart. Current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo termed Kerry’s meeting with ‘the world’s largest state-sponsor of terror’ ‘unseemly and unprecedented’ and ‘beyond inappropriate,’” Judicial Watch said.
Kerry also met in 2018 with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and French President Emmanuel Macron and spoke on the phone with European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, Judicial Watch said.
Kerry also allegedly lobbied members of Congress.
“John Kerry wasn’t elected president, so he should avoid colluding with Iran and other foreign government to undermine U.S. foreign policy,” said Judicial Watch President Fitton. “Our lawsuit is meant to discover not only what Kerry was up to but also to unearth who inside the Deep State Trump ‘resistance’ were coordinating with Kerry’s clandestine efforts to undermine the President Trump’s Iran policy.”
The JW lawsuit was brought after the State Department declined to respond to a request for the information.
Similarly, WND reported, Kerry was accused of conducting unauthorized diplomacy in 1970 in Paris with Vietnamese communist leaders.
Then a private citizen, Kerry met with Madame Binh, the top Viet Cong negotiator to the Paris Peace talks in which Henry Kissinger represented the United States. The following July he held a press conference calling on President Nixon to accept Binh’s peace proposal in which the United States essentially would surrender.
Regarding his more recent talks with Iranian officials, former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer told Fox News that Kerry was “out giving advice to Iran about how to maneuver around what Donald Trump is doing; it’s insidious.”
“I don’t know if it’s legal or illegal, I don’t care about that side of it. It’s wrong,” he said.
Kerry has admitted in promotions for a new book that he still speaks with European and Iranian diplomats.
He said he repeatedly has met with Iranian officials on the topic of the scrapped deal.
The former secretary of state argued that all people who have been in that position “have conversations (about) the state of affairs with the world.”
However, he didn’t like others doing the same thing.
In 2015, he lashed out at 47 Republican senators who wrote to Tehran warning the rogue regime that any deal with Obama would be voided when he left office.
Judicial Watch said it also has sued for information about Obama’s decision to transfer $400 million in cash to Iran, which apparently was just one part of a total payment of $1.7 billion to Iran.
Source » wnd