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WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump has never been a big fan of former Secretary of State John Kerry, accusing him of unknowingly negotiating the Iranian nuclear deal and foregoing US competitiveness by sealing the deal. of Paris on climate change.
Now, even though Trump has pulled out of Kerry's signature as a top US diplomat, the president is stepping up criticism, accusing the former Massachusetts senator of breaking the law.
Republican lawmakers are also attacking Kerry for his frank revelation that since he left office he has met several times with Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister who was his main interlocutor in the negotiations of agreement with Iran.
Such meetings between a US citizen and a foreign official are not contrary to the law and are not necessarily inappropriate or contrary to federal regulations, but Trump and the GOP declare that they are trying to subvert the hard line of the Iranian administration .
"John Kerry has had illegal meetings with the very hostile Iranian regime, which can only hurt our excellent work to the detriment of the American people," tweeted Trump Thursday. "He told them to wait for the Trump administration – was he registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act?"
The law that Trump invoked – the Foreign Agent Registration Act, or FARA – requires the registration and transparency of individuals or corporations acting on behalf of foreign governments, political parties or individuals .
But Josh Rosenstein, a Washington law firm's associate Sandler Reiff and lobbying compliance specialist, said there are too many unanswered questions about whether the law applies to interactions of Kerry with Zarif. FARA's provisions do not extend to activities carried out entirely abroad, so Kerry interacted with him. It is also unclear whether Iranians specifically asked Kerry for advice.
"The devil is always in the details," Rosenstein said. "Just advising a foreign government does not make you a foreign agent."
When reports of Kerry's ex-officio contacts with Zarif surfaced in May, Trump tweeted similar thoughts. "John Kerry can not overcome the fact that he got his chance and blew him up! Stay away from John negotiations, you are hurting your country!" He said on May 8 that one day earlier, he had tweeted: "The United States does not need the diplomacy of John Kerry's shadow for the very poorly negotiated contract. Iran, it is he who created this MESS! "
Kerry, who is currently promoting his new book "Every Day is Extra", did not get an immediate response on Friday in Trump's latest issue of Twitter. In the past, he severely criticized the president and his decision in May to withdraw from the 2015 agreement between Iran and several world powers that lifted sanctions against Tehran in exchange for restrictions on its program nuclear.
The State Department took a boring but relatively unobtrusive tone when it was questioned on Wednesday about Kerry telling conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that the first reports of his talks with Zarif were accurate. Current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took office in April. One of these meetings took place in Norway and another in Germany. A third would have taken place at United Nations headquarters, which is not technically located on American soil.
"I saw him (Kerry) brag about the meetings he had with the Iranian government and representatives of the Iranian government," department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters. "And I've also seen reports that he would provide, according to reports, advice to the Iranian government.I think the best advice he should give the Iranian government is to stop supporting terrorist groups in the world, to stop supporting Hezbollah. "
"On the contrary, he should ask the Iranian government to stop spending money on all this adventurism and terrorism in the world and start spending their money on their own people," she said.
But a top State Department official, deputy secretary of state for economic and commercial affairs, Manish Singh, told a congressional panel Thursday that it would be "very inappropriate" for Kerry to lead a "diplomacy of the shadow "administration.
Kerry himself told Hewitt that he was not training the Iranians on how to deal with the Trump administration.
"It's not my job, and my trainer would not do it, you know, it's not like that it works," he said during the interview. "What I've done, is trying to get from him (Zarif) what Iran might be willing to do to change the dynamics in the Middle East for the best."
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Richard Lardner contributed to this report.
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