Newt Gingrich: State Dept. Has Listened to Iran More Than to ‘The Resistance’

WASHINGTON, DC – Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) spoke to the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) on Friday about the danger posed by Iran and accused the U.S. State Department of listening to that dictatorship more than to those who seek a free and democratic Iran.

Gingrich said he has lobbied for the Iranian resistance movement in the U.S. and the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) since he was the top Republican in the House.

Gingrich said:

Because basically the Iranian dictatorship ran a false flag operation to set up a totally phony designation, which the State Department and bureaucracy went along with, so for a long period of time we were willing to listen to the actual dictatorship while not listening to the resistance, even though the resistance was trying to tell us the truth about the dictatorship, which was lying to us.

Gingrich acknowledged that Iranians have suffered in exile in Iraq at Camp Liberty and Camp Ashraf where thousands of members and sympathizers of MEK have been living for the past 25 years:

In my experience, the elements of the National Council of Resistance of Iran who are still inside Iran — and there are thousands of people who are obviously highly quiet about this otherwise they would be picked up by the secret police and killed — but they have been the best source of information on the nuclear program consistently, and have found things when the CIA has been telling us they didn’t exist.

Gingrich said, “And I hope that this administration will now be part of this process of beginning to unravel both the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps  (IRGC) and then, ultimately, the dictatorship.”

That unraveling should include the U.S. designating the IRGC a terrorist organization, which would have a direct impact on the Iranian economy, according to Gingrich.

Gingrich said in his remarks that the extent of the danger posed by Iran cannot be understated.

“As long as that dictatorship is in power, as long as it’s able to spend money, as long as it is able to project terrorism around the world, it is ultimately a mortal danger to the United States,” Gingrich said. “And of course, it was a terrible thing for the Iranian people.”

“A dictatorship which, in 1988, killed 30,000 people, something which for some reason The New York Times and The Washington Post don’t find to be horrifying,” Gingrich said.

Gingrich detailed the Iran’s aspirations in a chilling laundry list:

You have a repressive dictatorship which projects power now all the way to the Mediterranean, has plans to build a port in Lebanon that it would control, has plans to build missile factories in both Syria and Lebanon, ultimately designed to destroy Israel, already has helped Hezbollah get something on the order of 75,000 to 100,000 missiles, creating I think a much bigger problem on the northern front for Israel than anybody has come to grips with yet.

“And it’s all going to get worse,” he added.

Gingrich also praised President Donald Trump on his decision to decertify the JCPOA nuclear deal, calling it “just about exactly the right path” and said that the president’s public remarks about Iran have been bold.

That includes Trump’s speech to the United Nations, which Gingrich said was “probably the strongest condemnation of Iran, of the Iranian dictatorship, ever uttered in the United Nations.”

Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of NCRI, has welcomed the new U.S. policy to “condemn the IRGC’s gross violations of human rights” in Iran and “to deny the Iranian regime and especially the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) funding for its malign activities, and oppose IRGC activities that extort the wealth of the Iranian people.”

She said acknowledgment that supreme leader Ali Khamenei “oppresses its people, abuses their rights,” and “exports violence, destabilizes its neighbors, and sponsors terrorism abroad,” is a recognition of the illegitimacy of the Iranian regime.

The event was sponsored by the Organization of Iranian American Communities in the U.S.