President Donald Trump took phone calls from several reporters on Friday, dishing to each new information about the negotiations between the U.S. and Iran. Traditional channels in Washington, D.C., and Tehran, meanwhile, largely stayed quiet.
Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi announced early on Friday that the country would halt its threat to attack vessels transiting the waterways off its coasts — a threat that has persisted the entirety of the conflict, which has sent oil prices up dramatically — and since then, Trump has barely put the phone down.
Trump told Bloomberg News that Iran has agreed to suspend its nuclear program indefinitely without the reported concession of the U.S. releasing frozen Iranian funds. He told Axios that a “meeting will probably take place over the weekend” and that he believes they will “get a deal in the next day or two.”
Vice President JD Vance, presidential envoy Steve Witkoff, and Trump’s son-in-law and former foreign policy adviser Jared Kushner led the U.S. delegation during last weekend’s talks in Islamabad, Pakistan. It’s unknown who will lead this weekend’s meetings, if they happen.
Trump discussed the retrieval of Iran’s buried highly enriched uranium, which is believed to be under significant amounts of rubble due to U.S. strikes in June in what the administration called Operation Midnight Hammer, with Reuters.
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“We’re going to get it together. We’re going to go in with Iran, at a nice leisurely pace, and go down and start excavating with big machinery … We’ll bring it back to the United States,” he told the outlet during another phone interview.
Iran is believed to have had more than 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium, which CIA Director John Ratcliffe said last month “would be capable of putting together 10 nuclear weapons,” though the status of it is unknown given it’s buried deep underground.
Seemingly later in the day, Trump went further in a conversation with CBS News, telling the outlet that Iran has “agreed to everything.” He also said “our people” would retrieve the buried highly enriched uranium, which he frequently refers to as “nuclear dust,” but he denied it would be U.S. troops.
Trump also told CBS News that Iran has agreed to stop supporting its regional proxy forces, which include Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen, as well as various militias in Iraq and Syria.
Trump’s willingness to pick up reporters’ phone calls and give them rapid-fire quotes in bite-sized interviews has become a defining trait of the media response to the Iran war, and a means of the president controlling the narrative surrounding first the conflict and now the negotiations.
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Neither the White House nor the State Department has held a formal briefing Friday despite the president’s string of announcements. And neither Iranian Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf nor Araghchi, who led Iran’s negotiating delegation last weekend, has confirmed their willingness to give up the highly enriched uranium or stop supporting their axis of resistance.
The two-week ceasefire that paused the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran is set to expire Tuesday, and it’s unclear whether the two sides will resume offensive operations and retaliatory attacks if a deal is not finalized or the ceasefire is not extended.
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