Tehran, IRNA- Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, in an interview with the American television network NBC, stressed that the Islamic Republic never hatched plans to assassinate anyone, including Donald Trump and will never do so.
Pezeshkian said in response to a question raised by Lester Holt in his NBC Nightly News program that one of the potential threats to diplomacy could be seen as what the US believes Iran had planned to assassinate Trump. Was there such a plan?
The Iranian president explained further: “All the assassinations and acts of terror that we see happening in the region, Europe and elsewhere, is there any trace of the involvement of Iranians in them or there were other foreign nationals? Have there been any links of those terror assassinations with Iran? Never! Iran has never been in pursuit of assassination and acts of terror”.
“Never, by no means!”, Pezeshkian said when the NBC anchor in Tehran repeated the question asking him whether Iran ever planned to kill Trump or will he promise that there’s no such action taken in the future.
"We did not have any such intention from the beginning”, the Iranian president underlined, adding that "What is being called a conspiracy against Trump is a plot by Israel and other countries to promote hostility toward Iran."
Iran has, time and again, rejected attempts with “malicious political motives” to implicate the country into assassination plots in the United States. That after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US Justice Department claimed that a Pakistani national is suspected of collaborating with Iran to plot and assassinate political figures, including Trump.
Holt asked Pezeshkian questions related to a number of other issues, including the ongoing multi-front war in West Asia amid an impending Gaza ceasefire deal, Iran’s relationship and willingness to negotiate with the US, Iran’s support for resistance groups, its nuclear program among others.
NBC will broadcast the full interview on January 15, Mohammad-Mehdi Tabatabai, deputy director of communication and information at the Presidential Office, wrote on his X account on Tuesday.
In wording carefully chosen to give just a hint of Pezeshkian’s intended message, Tabatabi said that the Islamic Republic of Iran “seeks peace and de-escalation in the region and the world, condemns warmongering, encroachments, and genocide by the Zionist regime and is ready for equal and honorable negotiation.”
That last part — that Iran is ready for negotiations on an equal footing — could be a significant message to the incoming Donald Trump administration.
In 2018, Trump withdrew the United States from a multilateral hard-fought deal with Iran known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that had been meant to resolve a dispute over the Iranian nuclear program and had raised hopes of ushering in a new era of international engagement.
Trump’s withdrawal and his subsequent move to re-impose sanctions under his so-called “maximum pressure” campaign not only put those hopes on ice but even failed Trump to pursue his goal, which was to force Tehran to renegotiate the agreement.
Iran refused to renegotiate the agreement that was hammered out after two years of intensive negotiations between Iran and several world powers, including the US. Iran held the US government and the European signatories accountable for failing the deal with their inaction and lack of adherence to their obligations under the JCPOA.
While President Pezeshkian’s remarks on other issues during the interview with NBC is unclear, but as Tabatabai’s hint in a rather encrypted way, a potential announcement that Iran is ready to negotiate with the Trump administration would be a significant development in itself.
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