Vice President JD Vance said this week that U.S. military officials are working directly with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. The vice president made the comments after departing Switzerland following the conclusion of talks with Iran that lasted until Monday.

“One of the things we wanted to come out [of the negotiations]” was a “channel on the Iranian side” to seek conflict resolution, Vance told the outlet UnHerd aboard Air Force Two. “Which we did. They were like, ‘OK, fine, we’ll send somebody from the IRGC to go hang out in Doha with somebody from CENTCOM,’ and that’s how we’re going to settle a lot of these disputes,” he said.

President Donald Trump designated the IRGC an FTO during his first term in 2019 and ordered the strike that killed IRGC Quds Force head Qasem Soleimani in 2020. Announcing the designation, the State Department said the group “has been directly involved in terrorist plotting; its support for terrorism is foundational and institutional, and it has killed U.S. citizens.” The IRGC also “continues to provide financial and other material support” for terror groups including Hezbollah, Kataib Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the statement added. 

The group played a central role in Iran’s attacks around the region during the U.S.-Iran war, including an attack on the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain earlier this month, and is linked to dozens of recent plots and attacks in Europe. U.S. authorities have also repeatedly alleged IRGC involvement in assassination schemes targeting current and former American officials, including Trump.

Vance said that the Emiratis — “by far the most hawkish, by far the most pro-Israel country in the [Gulf Cooperation Council]” — are also “having conversations with the Iranians that have never happened before, including with the IRGC,” namely about economic incentives to urge Iran to cooperate.

Regarding criticism of the memorandum of understanding reached with Iran, Vance said, “There are many things I don’t like about the comparison to the [2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action], but one of them is that the MOU is a much more generic document than the JCPOA.”

“It really is a foundational document,” he said of the MOU. “Let’s open the strait, let’s stop shooting at each other, and let’s see if we can make a nuclear deal. And from their perspective, it’s, ‘Let’s lift the blockade, let’s stop shooting at each other, and let’s see if there’s a sanctions deal.’ That’s fundamentally where it’s coming from.”

Vance claimed the Iranians are now offering “things radically different from the JCPOA” and “want a fundamentally transformed relationship with the United States and the world.”

Iran is still plotting assassination attempts against officials from the first Trump administration involved in the killing of Quds Force head Gen. Qassem Soleimani, a senior FBI official cautioned on Thursday.

The warning came from FBI operations director Michael Glasheen, who testified before the House Homeland Security Committee during a hearing on “Worldwide Threats to the Homeland.” Glasheen was appearing before the panel on behalf of FBI Director Kash Patel, who was unable to attend Thursday’s hearing. 

“Iran continues to plot attacks against former government officials in retaliation for the January 2020 death Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, Commander Qassem Soleimani,” Glasheen said. “They also have continued to provide support to their proxies and terrorist organizations throughout the world, such as Lebanese Hezbollah.”

The Justice Department charged several individuals last November in a thwarted murder-for-hire plot orchestrated by Iran against Trump ahead of the presidential election. U.S. authorities have also accused Iran of plotting assassination attempts against former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former National Security Advisor John Bolton for their involvement in the 2020 strike that killed Soleimani.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent appeared alongside Glasheen at Thursday’s hearing, during which Kent warned of ISIS, Al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations taking inspiration from Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel. 

“Honestly, the attacks of Oct. 7, the decentralized and just barbaric nature of that, is the new terrorist playbook,” Kent said. “They’re not looking necessarily for a spectacular attack like we had on 9/11, but targets of opportunity, like we tragically saw with the terrorist attack in Washington, D.C., these smaller cells or even individual operatives taking action. That’s what has us very concerned, combined with just the sheer volume of threats.”

Kent was responding to a question from Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX), who asked what tactics and techniques were being used by terrorist organizations that the U.S. should be on guard for from individuals in the U.S. illegally with ties to those groups.

The NCTC director also revealed that the agency has identified over 2,000 Afghans and 16,000 other individuals with ties to terrorist organizations, including ISIS and Al-Qaida, who entered the U.S. illegally during the Biden administration. The Trump administration began reassessing all visas from 19 Muslim majority countries in response to the fatal shooting of two National Guard troops in Washington earlier this month, allegedly perpetrated by an Afghan national. 

“Right now, we’re in the triage phase. We’ve already identified 18,000 individuals who have ties to known, suspected terrorists and terrorist organizations, so we’re starting with them, working with DHS and the FBI to locate and deport them,” Kent told Rep. Brad Knott (R-NC). “But, as you pointed out, it is a much bigger problem. We’ve had 2-2.7 million folks from Muslim countries, Muslim regions, that have come into the country under Biden with minimum to no vetting.”

“Any of those individuals who were vetted, such as the terrorist in D.C., they were vetted under a war zone standard to see if they could serve as a soldier or as a guard or a cook or something like that, to see if they pose a threat to us tactically in Afghanistan or Iraq, but not to be our neighbors,” he continued. “Two completely different systems of vetting. The Biden administration used the tactical vetting as a ruse to get millions of people into the country.”

Kent then warned that individuals already in the U.S. cannot be vetted after being granted asylum, and argued that all illegal entrants or visa holders who received expedited approval must be deported for national security purposes. 

“What I would like to emphasize to this committee and to the American people is that we simply cannot go back and retroactively vet these millions of folks who came in under Joe Biden. We have to locate them, and we have to deport them as soon as we possibly can,” Kent said. “Those who want to reapply, they can have the opportunity to reapply. In terms of what we need, we just need the longitude to do our jobs.”