The United States views the process that made Ebrahim Raisi Iran's president-elect as "pretty manufactured," US State Department spokesman Ned Price said on Monday.
He repeated the US view that Iran's recent election was neither free nor fair.
"Our Iran policy is designed to advance US interests and that is regardless of who is chosen as Iran's president in a ... process that we consider to be pretty manufactured. This was not a free and fair election process," Price told reporters in a telephone briefing.
Meanwhile, Biden administration officials are insisting that the election of a hard-liner as Iran’s president won’t affect prospects for reviving the faltering 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran. But there are already signs that their goal of locking in a deal just got tougher.
Optimism that a deal was imminent faded as the latest talks ended Sunday without tangible indications of significant progress. And on Monday, in his first public comments since the vote Raisi rejected a key Biden goal of expanding on the nuclear deal if negotiators are able to salvage the old one.
President Joe Biden and his team have made a US return to the deal one of their top foreign policy priorities.
The 2015 agreement was one of President Barack Obama’s signature achievements, one that aides now serving in the Biden administration had helped negotiate and that Donald Trump repudiated and tried to dismantle as president.
