RFK Jr. sees Iran’s president of the last decade, Putin, and Xi as people the US president should meet

AURORA, Colo. — Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a speech Sunday that the U.S. president should sit down with foreign adversaries for negotiations, name-checking Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Chinese Xi Jinping and former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. who has not been in office for over a decade.

The comment comes on a day when Iran’s President since 2021, Ebrahim Raisi, was making global headlines after his death in a helicopter crash on the Iran-Azerbaijan border. Raisi’s death had not been confirmed by NBC News at the time of Kennedy’s comment, but reports of the accident had ricocheted through U.S. and global media outlets throughout the day.

“You can’t just ban AI. You can’t even over-regulate it, because that would drive it out of our country. We want to keep it here,” Kennedy said in his speech, speaking about artificial intelligence to a crowd of hundreds on Sunday afternoon.

“We need to sit down with other world leaders, with people like President Xi, President Putin and President Ahmadinejad, the Prime Minister, everyone – we can’t afford to be at war anymore,” Kennedy said.

Ahmadinejad was replaced by Hassan Rouhani in August 2013. Ahmadinejad became known around the world as a major supporter of Iran’s nuclear program. Iran, the United States and several other countries agreed in 2015 to restrictions on the program, but former President Donald Trump ended the Obama-era agreement under his administration, saying the deal was not enough to “prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb.”

The Kennedy campaign did not respond to a question from NBC News about why it included Ahmadinejad in the list of leaders the US president is expected to meet.