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Moving on, today I have Nathan with me. We’re releasing our annual Country Reports on Terrorism. I hope everyone sees that this administration has taken on terrorist threats that other administrations simply downplayed:

We designated the IRGC, including its Qods Force, as a terrorist organization, the first time the authority has ever been used on a foreign government.

We kept pressure on Iranian proxies like Hizballah by encouraging our partners to designate or ban them, as Paraguay, Argentina, and now the United Kingdom did just last year.

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The best pathway out of the Venezuelan crisis is through a broadly acceptable transitional government to administer a free and fair presidential and parliamentary elections.

The Maduro regime has also mismanaged Venezuela’s abundant natural resources to the point that a country with one of the world’s largest oil reserves must import gasoline from Iran.

Today, the United States is sanctioning five Iranian ship captains who delivered around a million and a half barrels of Iranian gasoline to Venezuela in support of the illegitimate Maduro regime.

These captains’ assets will be blocked, and they won’t be able to operate in U.S. waters.

Mariners who do business with Iran and Venezuela will face consequences from the United States of America.

We will continue to support the National Assembly, Interim President Guaido, and the Venezuelan people in their quest to restore democracy.

Turning to another rogue actor, the Islamic Republic of Iran:

Last Friday, the IAEA Board of Governors adopted a resolution calling on Iran to provide the IAEA inspectors the information and access it’s obligated to provide. I want to thank Director Grossi and his team for their faithful work.

Iran’s denial of access to IAEA inspectors and refusal to cooperate with the IAEA’s investigation of potentially undeclared nuclear material and activity raises serious questions about Tehran’s efforts and what it is precisely that they are trying to hide.

Iran’s refusal to cooperate is wholly separate from the JCPOA. This is simply about whether Iran is honoring its own legally binding safeguards obligations. If Iran fails – if it fails to cooperate with the IAEA obligations, the international community must be prepared to take further action.

Today, Special Representative Hook is briefing members of the United Nations Security Council on our diplomacy to prevent the arms embargo from expiring on Iran in October of this year.

Without action, on the 18th of that month, Iran will be able to purchase advanced weapon systems and become the arms dealer of choice for terrorists and rogue regimes all throughout the world. This is unacceptable.

Iran has been under arms restrictions by the United Nations since back in 2007. And one of the greatest failures of the Iran nuclear deal was to allow these restrictions to expire without regard to how the regime behaved.

The resolution that we will present to the UN Security Council would extend the conventional arms embargo on the leading state sponsor of terror.

Our focus now is to work with the Security Council to pass this resolution. But in the event it doesn’t happen, I would remind the world that the Obama administration’s officials said very clearly that the United States has the unilateral ability to snap back sanctions into place.

Two quotes, first from President Obama. He said, “If at any time the United States believes Iran has failed to meet its commitments, no other state can block our ability to snap back those multilateral sanctions.”

And then my predecessor Secretary Kerry said, look, “If we’re not happy, we can go to the Security Council and we alone” – we alone – “can force a vote on… snapping back of those sanctions.”

The legal options in the Security Council are clear. Our great preference is to have a Council resolution that would extend the arms embargo, but we are determined to ensure that that arms embargo continues.

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QUESTION: Good to see you, too, Mr. Secretary. The Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, said that Iran has no problem with talks with the United States, and I quote, “only if the United States fulfills its obligations under the nuclear deal, apologizes and compensates Tehran for its withdrawal from the 2015 deal.” Your response, sir?

SECRETARY POMPEO: Yeah, that is not remotely serious. The United States has been clear about our expectations. We’ve been clear about our goals. We ask the Islamic Republic of Iran to behave like a normal nation. We’re happy to engage in conversations with them when the time is right, but the conditions that suggest somehow we give a bunch of money to the Iranians so they can foment terror around the world is simply ludicrous. It’s just not how this administration behaves.

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QUESTION: Yeah, back to Iran. You put the threat on the table again of the snapback of – unilateral snapback of sanctions. Does that mean you don’t have the support in the UN for an extended embargo that you wish to have?

SECRETARY POMPEO: I don’t know.

QUESTION: Why you don’t know?

SECRETARY POMPEO: By the way, it’s not a threat. The – what I’ve made clear is U.S. policy. It is unacceptable – it’s unacceptable for the Europeans to have equipment inside of Iran, move into Iran, that can threaten the people of Europe, right. People from Belgium to Denmark are at threat because of the expiration of an arms embargo on the world’s largest state sponsor of terror. I’m hopeful that the whole world will accept the proposition that this arms embargo needs to be extended. They’ll be an arms merchant, too. Not only will they take weapon systems and purchase high-end weapon systems from Russia and China, but they’ll sell their weapon systems all across the world too. This is not the – this is a rogue regime, they shouldn’t have the capacity to do that, and I am very hopeful that the whole world, when we come to the point when this decision must be made, that they will come to the same understanding that the United States has, that this is dangerous for the world for this to have expired.

QUESTION: Can I have a follow up on this?

SECRETARY POMPEO: Sure, go ahead.

QUESTION: You said you don’t know. Does it mean you don’t know you have enough support in UN, or does it mean you don’t know how the Europeans and the Russians and the Chinese will act?

SECRETARY POMPEO: We are out working diligently to make sure everybody understands the risk that’s associated with the arms embargo expiring. This is really dangerous for the whole world, for the region. The Gulf states know it too. There’s tremendous support for what it is we’re trying to do. I think all but a couple of nations understand that this should not expire, and there’s going to be a discussion about how it is that we extend it.

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QUESTION: Mr. Ambassador, just doing a quick research on the report that you just released, and I noticed that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been mentioned 109 times in your report. Is it fair to say that the Islamic Republic of Iran poses the biggest threat when it comes to terrorist activities around the world to United States? And in part of that report, it talks about the connection between Iran and al-Qaida operatives. What evidence do you have to show that Iran is helping or harboring al-Qaida operatives?

AMBASSADOR SALES: Thanks for the question. It’s difficult to rank order the terrorist threats that we face. We have to take them all seriously and we do take them all seriously, whether it’s ISIS or al-Qaida or whether it’s Iran. Of particular concern when it comes to Iran is the fact that it is a state; it has the capabilities and it has the resources of a state. And when you introduce the concept of state sponsorship, the additional resources, the additional capabilities that an SST like Iran can bring is a reason for severe concern, and we’re seeing the results of that all around the world. Last year, we saw – or the year before, we saw a series of Iranian plots to commit assassinations in the heart of Western Europe. We see Iran bankrolling terrorists in the Middle East to include Hizballah, Shia militia groups in Iraq that are responsible for attacks on American personnel there, diplomats and soldiers alike, and that are also involved last year in ruthlessly suppressing peaceful political protests in Iraq.

A hundred and nine times? I’m surprised it wasn’t 110 given the scope of Iranian terrorist malignancy around the world. There was another question in there that I —

QUESTION: About the linkage between al-Qaida and Iran.

AMBASSADOR SALES: Ah, right. And so when you see Iranian fingerprints on so many different terrorist groups around the world, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Iran would also have connections to al-Qaida. I can’t comment on intelligence matters, but what we have said publicly in the past is that after 9/11, Iran failed to comply with its obligations to take into custody and extradite for prosecution al-Qaida operatives who were linked to the attacks.

More recently, we have said publicly that Iran has allowed al-Qaida operatives freedom of movement within Iran to enable the movement of fighters and money into conflict zones in neighboring countries.

If Iran wants to rejoin the community of responsible nations, here is a start: Crack down on the terrorists that caused 9/11. Crack down on the terrorist proxies that foment violence around the world.

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