Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Friday hit back after President Trump called him “BAD!” and accused him, without evidence, of “illegal meetings with the very hostile Iranian Regime.”
“This is the first president that I know of who spends more time reading his Twitter likes than his briefing books or the Constitution of the United States,” Kerry told Bill Maher on “Real Time,” noting that Henry Kissinger has spent the last 40 years meeting with leaders of foreign governments after serving as Richard Nixon’s top diplomat.
Kerry, a former Massachusetts senator who served as Barack Obama’s secretary of state during his second term, also ripped Trump’s behavior in office: “He’s got the maturity of an 8-year-old boy with the insecurity of a teenage girl.”
Kerry, who is promoting a new memoir called “Every Day is Extra,” also offered a dig at all of the members of the Trump campaign and administration who are cooperating with the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election — including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
“The conversation he ought to be worried about is Paul Manafort with Robert Mueller,” Kerry said. “It’s gone from ‘The Art of the Deal’ to ‘The Art of the Squeal.’”
“Unfortunately, we have a president, literally, for whom the truth … the whole truth and nothing but the truth is three different things,” he said.
On Thursday, Trump had tweeted his complaint about Kerry’s recent meetings with Iranian officials; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also complained that his predecessor was “actively undermining” the administration.
In a statement, Kerry’s spokesman Matt Summers said: “There’s nothing unusual, let alone unseemly or inappropriate, about former diplomats meeting with foreign counterparts. Secretary [Henry] Kissinger has done it for decades with Russia and China. What is unseemly and unprecedented is for the podium of the State Department to be hijacked for political theatrics.”
Meetings between foreign officials and private U.S. citizens are generally viewed as legal, NBC News reported.
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