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Iran’s president turned down Trump invitation to meet

A spokesman for the Islamic Republic confirmed Iranian reports that Trump allegedly tried to meet Rouhani for a face-to-face meeting. 

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani rejected an invitation by US President Donald Trump for a face-to-face meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly conference in New York last month, a senior Iranian analyst disclosed on Sunday.

“US President Trump has invited President Rouhani to a face-to-face meeting during Mr. Rouhani’s visit to New York to participate in the UN annual conference in September but our president has turned down the offer,” Mahdi Faza’eli wrote on Sunday, according to Iran’s Fars news service.

Faza’eli said Trump extended the invitation a day after Trump’s powerful speech at the United Nations, during which he stated that the Iran nuclear deal was “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the US has ever entered into. Frankly, that deal is an embarrassment to the United States, and I don’t think you’ve heard the last of it. Believe me.”

Iranian media perceived Trump’s address as an insult.

Faza’eli also said that French President Emanuel Macron had also tried to persuade Rouhani to accept the meeting, but failed.

Faza’eli claimed that US efforts to hold talks with Iran are nothing new, saying that “the Americans are sure that such negotiations will benefit them, but they will have no achievements for Iran but harm.”

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Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi confirmed Faza’eli’s revelation, saying that the willingness to meet was exclusively American, “but was rejected by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s president”.

However, Qassemi denied that Macron made efforts to mediate.

In 2013, then President Barack Obama and Rouhani spoke by telephone, the highest-level contact between the two countries in decades.

By: World Israel News Staff