According to IRNA on Sunday, Iranian government spokesman Ali Rabie said that formerly-detained Press TV reporter Ms Marzieh Hashemi "can go and interview (Pompeo)" so he can explain the "economic terrorism" imposed on Iran by the US.
He said that Iran does not “shy away from hearing what people say, (even though) what they did to our reporters… is an insult to both the media and discussions.”
The move comes after Pompeo told Bloomberg on Thursday that he would “happily” travel to Iran to use Iranian national TV as a platform to explain the reasons for US-imposed sanctions on the country.
Ms Marzieh Hashemi is an American-Iranian who works as a reporter for Iran’s publicly funded news channel Press TV.
converted to Islam, inspired by the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and eventually moved to Iran in 2008, where she began working as a journalist.
She was detained by the FBI while travelling to the United States to visit family in January.
The arrest caused an outburst from Iranian officials who described the decision as a “political game” amid rising tensions between the US and Iran.
While she was released after 10 days without charge, Press TV claims she was discriminated against by the US prison system; being denied halal food, forced to eat pork, and having her hijab pulled off her.
Since the scrapping of the Iran Nuclear Deal by the Trump administration, Iran declared that it would exceed the limits on enrichments set out in the agreement.
The US has also blamed Iran for an attack against tankers belonging to US-allied countries parked off the coast of Iran, for which Iran also denies responsibility.
Iran has since fallen into a tit-for-tat tanker war with the UK, a staunch US-ally, having one of its own tankers impounded in Gibraltar on accusations of breaching sanctions on Syria.
In response, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard seized a British-owned tanker in the Strait of Hormuz.
