Al-Monitor- According to Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghassemi, US President Donald Trump requested a bilateral meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in New York during this year's United Nations General Assembly meeting in September. Iran rebuffed the request.


Mehdi Fazaeli, a conservative analyst and former managing director at Fars News Agency, broke the story with an Oct. 29 article on the alleged request. According to Fazaeli, the request came one day after Trump's speech to the assembly, in which he referenced Iran a dozen times, calling its government an “oppressive regime” and a dictatorship. In the same speech, Trump also called the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and the six world powers “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.” Fazaeli described Trump’s speech as “insulting” toward Iran and contextualized it as being in line with the US objective of selling arms to regional allies.

Fazaeli wrote that French President Emmanuel Macron had offered to facilitate the meeting, but Rouhani had turned him down as well. Ghassemi, who confirmed Trump’s request when asked about it by Iranian media Oct. 29, did not, however, confirm Macron’s reported involvement.

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