Keith Kellogg shares his side of the story
The former chief of staff for the National Security Council under Donald Trump claims John Kerry undercut the former President’s foreign policy towards Iran during an unauthorized conversation with senior Iranian officials.
The former Secretary of State did his thing and he will have to pay for it.
“He did it all the time,” Kellogg told Just the News when asked if Kerry sent a conflicting message to Iran. “By just the very fact that he went over there, and the fact that he talked to [Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad] Zarif, sent a very, very strong counter-message to what we were trying to do out there.”
“We read cables and we understand what’s going on. We talked about it in the Oval Office several times. It was not helpful what he was doing, because he was basically countering every message we were putting out there and trying to push them into some type of negotiation.”
The former President reimposed tough sanctions on Iranians after leaving the multilateral deal with the Islamist regime.
“I was in there many times when the president would reach out to people like Macron of France, he would reach out to Boris Johnson in U.K., and trying to get them to be an intermediary to talk to the Iranians to get us into some type of discussions. And we always had a pushback,” Kellogg said. “Because we had people like Kerry out there talking to Zarif and others.”
The Trump administration didn’t hold Kerry back, and Kellogg was dealing with too many problems back then.
“We knew what he was doing and the frustration we had is that it was basically acknowledged by everybody and nobody cared about if one of us has [sic] done that,” Kellogg said.
In 2016, Michael Flynn got the attention of the Federal Bureau of investigation for considering US sanctions against Russia and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The FBI tried to charge Flynn with an archaic law prohibiting people from conducting unauthorized diplomacy.
Kerry is Joe Biden’s special envoy for the climate. He told Zarif about the many times Israel hit Iranian targets. According to him, the information was in the public realm.
Kerry cited a Twitter message by a journalist who had covered a news report about a senior Israeli official who claimed that Israel had attacked Iran’s interest in Syria 200 times. Kerry mentioned the same number in his conversation with Zarif. We don’t know if this conversation predated the public report.
The White House has yet to respond to a request for comments.
Kellogg says that sharing classified information is illegal even if the material is out in the public realm.
“Even if it’s public record, you never acknowledge classified operations. The press may get it, but you don’t acknowledge it,” Kellogg said.
The news about Kerry’s conversation with Zarif broke after a report on a leaked interview of the latter conducted in March.
In this audio, Zarif claims the elite Revolutionary Guards have a bigger influence in foreign affairs and the nuclear dossier than him.
“I have never been able to tell a military commander to do something in order to aid diplomacy,” Zarif said.
Source: The Epoch Times
