ACLJ Presses State Dept. on John Kerry’s Secret Meetings with Iran (Sekulow Recap)

The ACLJ has filed a FOIA request with the U.S. State Department regarding John Kerry’s secret meetings with Iran.

Today on Sekulow, we discussed John Kerry’s clandestine meetings with Iran and how the ACLJ is pressing the State Department to find out what they know about these meetings.

You may have seen this up on our website at ACLJ.org, but we issued a FOIA request regarding John Kerry and former Obama Administration officials, two of which – John Kerry and Robert Malley – are now back, serving in the Biden Administration. Both of them were also involved with creating the Iran Nuclear Deal back in 2015.

We now know that during 2017, 2018, 2019, and up until the Trump Administration banned him, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was holding meetings with former Obama officials. Remember that they went after Lt. General Michael Flynn, saying that during the transition, when he was preparing to serve as President Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor, he should not have been on the phone with world leaders or any of their ambassadors and representatives. Their justification was an archaic, outdated law called the Logan Act, which has never been used and in fact is likely unconstitutional.

These same people were meeting with Iranian officials to undermine the backchannel outreach being conducted at the time by the Trump Administration to Iran. They were essentially undermining talks that the Trump Administration was conducting and trying to conduct with Iran.

You’ll remember the success of the Abraham Accords. What were they worried about that then-President Trump could have pulled off regarding Iran?

My dad, ACLJ Chief Counsel Jay Sekulow, made the following point:

The irony of ironies here is the fact that you had a situation where the [then-]current Administration was put in the really uncomfortable position of trying to negotiate its foreign policy, which rested with the Trump Administration, while John Kerry is meeting with Foreign Minister Zarif and others on the situation with Iran. Now, they tried to bring charges against General Flynn on that when he was in conversations that were pretty benign. Now you have this.

Here’s the concern that I have. What was John Kerry doing? That’s the thing that bothers me. What was he up to?

Former Secretary of State and ACLJ Senior Counsel for Global Affairs Mike Pompeo joined us to talk about how inappropriate these secret talks were and what John Kerry likely said to the Iranian officials:

This is fundamentally antithetical to who we are as Americans. We have one President, one Secretary of State, one National Security Adviser at a time, and yet John Kerry was meeting with these folks and had deep relationships with them during his time as Secretary of State when they negotiated this really unfortunate deal with Iranians that put Americans at risk. He was almost certainly sending them the secret signal which said just wait, just wait, you can wait these guys out. We know they’re putting enormous pressure on you. We know that they have weakened you. We know that they have isolated you, but if you can just hang on until January 2021, it’s likely that the policy of appeasement will be rejoined.

This was completely inappropriate of John Kerry and others. That’s why we at the ACLJ have filed a FOIA request to find out what the State Department knew.

The full broadcast is complete with much more discussion about these secret meetings that John Kerry and others had with Iran during the Trump Administration. We also talked about the current situation with the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) “Pay for Slay” program. There’s also much more analysis from former Secretary of State and ACLJ Senior Counsel for Global Affairs Mike Pompeo that you won’t want to miss.

Watch the full broadcast below.