On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Briefing,” NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel stated that Iranian officials told him “they didn’t want a conflict,” and “There are hardliners in Iran who were stressing that this was a waste of time, that the U.S. was just trying to fool Iran, was playing to sort of expose their weaknesses, that they would be duped in the end, that the Iranians shouldn’t go down this path, and those hardliners will be proven right.”
Engel said, “[T]he Iranians made it clear to me — both the Iranian people and the Iranian government — that they wanted to avoid this. They were engaged in the peace talks with the Trump administration in the hopes of avoiding this exact scenario.
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