It seems pretty clear Hassan Rouhani is a shill for the regime and really never reformed anything. The clerics are doing a great job in fooling the international community:
Hassan Rouhani, the only cleric among the candidates, is a relic from the early days of the Revolution. His birth name is Hassan Feridoon -- a more Persian name then his Muslim name, Rouhani, meaning spiritual. Since the government takeover of the Islamic Revolution, Rouhani has held multiple positions, including Secretary and Representative of the National Security Council, member of the Assembly of Experts, member of the Expediency Council, President of the Center for Strategic Research, and various positions in the Iranian Parliament. In the early days of the revolution he was put in the position of Military Coordinator where he purged the existing military and replaced them with Khomeini loyalists. During the Iran-Iraq war, he served as Rafsanjani's right hand man.
Khatami and Rafsanjani played a significant role in Rouhani's victory by holding off declarations of support and persuading their actual candidate, Mohammad-Reza Aref, to drop out to avoid a split vote. So as of four days before the actual election day, Rouhani had emerged as the fake-reformist, "moderate" candidate in the race. As the peerless Iranian expatriate journalist, Amir Taheri, has written, "He never reformed anything."
Many reputable Iranian analysts such as Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh, have said, "Rouhani has never been a reformist, however he is supported by some members of the so-called pragmatists, like former Mullah Hashemi-Rafsanjaniand Khatami. In fact he is a representative of the Supreme Leaderhip and has always been very close to Khamenei. From that aspect, this election was more like a poll for the regime as it wants to show itself as a populist entity."
As a negotiator, Rohani is triumphantly duplicitous, known to lull his non-Iranian counterparts into a false sense of calm. Despite all the talk that, during his term as a nuclear negotiator, Iran appeared more cooperative with the international community, Rohani bragged about how he had tricked the West. In April of 2006 during a speech at the Assembly of Clerics,
Rouhani was caught on tape, boasting that while talks were taking place in Teheran, Iran was able to complete the installation of equipment for conversion of yellowcake -- a key stage in the nuclear fuel process -- at its Isfahan plant, but at the same time convince European diplomats that nothing was afoot. "From the outset," he said, "the Americans kept telling the Europeans, 'The Iranians are lying and deceiving you and they have not told you everything.' The Europeans used to respond, 'We trust them!'"
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Later, when the massive Tehran University uprisings occurred in 1999, Rouhani, who at the time headed up the Islamic National Security Council, reacted by saying: "These students are too pathetic and worthless for us to have to begin changing our directives. The continuance of this mess is not acceptable for our regime and the people. I issued strict orders against these elements [the students] to confront and severely deal with these opportunists. Wherever they are, we will handle them and suppress them. People will witness what today's security and disciplinary forces, the heroic members of the Basij (auxiliary militia) will do to these rabble-rousers and thugs, if they dare to imagine that they can continue their so-called peaceful campaign. The agent that has united our people today, is simply indestructible; that agent is Islam and Islamic rule which is the absolute symbol of the Supreme Leadership."
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