RFK Jr. notes last decade's Iranian president, Putin, Xi as people U.S. president should meet

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

The comment came on a day when the Iranian president since 2021, Ebrahim Raisi, dominated global headlines following his death in a helicopter crash on the Iran-Azerbaijan border. Raisi’s death hadn’t been confirmed by NBC News at the time of Kennedy’s comment, but reports of the crash had ricocheted around American and global media throughout the day.

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

“We need to be sitting down with other world leaders, with people like President Xi and President Putin and President Ahmadinejad, the prime minister, all the people — we can’t afford to be at war anymore,” Kennedy said.

Ahmadinejad was succeeded by Hassan Rouhani in August 2013. Ahmadinejad gained broad notice around the world as a major proponent of Iran’s nuclear program. Iran, the United States and several other nations agreed in 2015 on restrictions on the program, but former President Donald Trump exited the Obama-era agreement during his administration, saying the deal wasn’t enough to “prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb.”

The Kennedy campaign did not respond to a question from NBC News about why he included Ahmadinejad in the list of leaders the U.S. president should meet.