Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif is nothing but a "mouthpiece" and President Donald Trump's decision to place sanctions on him is a step taken because of his part in the country's "fundamentally illegitimate" regime, National Security Adviser John Bolton said Thursday.
"Remember that Iran has been a state sponsor of terrorism since Ronald Reagan in the 1980s," Bolton told Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo. "Zarif is the mouthpiece of that regime. He is really Iran's equivalent of P.T. Barnum. A sucker is born every minute. He found suckers in the United States and in Europe and got them to agree to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal."
Zarif is "not a diplomat," but he is a "con man, he's a shill, he's a grifter," Bolton added.
Iran's President Hassan Rouhani Thursday called the sanctions "childish" and said they are a barrier to diplomacy, but Bolton dismissed the idea that Zarif is a "serious interlocutor" with the United States.
"The real decision-maker in Iran is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader," said Bolton. "That's a good title to keep in mind."
Meanwhile, Iran has exceeded two key limits from the nuclear deal about enriching uranium, and has threatened to exceed a third, said Bolton.
"They're trying basically to blackmail Europeans to give them economic benefits from it," said Bolton. " I think the president understood this last year when he withdrew the United States from the deal Iran has never made a strategic decision to give up the pursuit of nuclear weapons. They could do it clandestinely, they can do it with North Korea, they can do it a lot of different ways. This deal was utterly inadequate. The president rightly characterized it as the worst debacle in American history."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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