How Obama Administration Officials Conducted Shadow Diplomacy With Iran to Undermine Trump

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 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, 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.

"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."

The seven-page memo was assembled during the meeting with Zarif, which came just days after reports emerged that Kerry was seeking to salvage the Iran nuclear agreement after Trump nixed it earlier that year.

During the meeting, Zarif claimed that Trump's policies have fomented anti-U.S. fervor in Iran and pointed to the popularity of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps leader Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated by Trump two years later in a drone strike.

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/disclosed-how-obama-administration-officials-conducted-shadow-diplomacy-with-iran-to-undermine-trump/