Parliamentary Chairman Davit Usupashvili, who is paying a week-long visit to the United States, met with senior officials from the Department of State on March 11.

Usupashvili met with Marie Yovanovitch, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs; Thomas Melia, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor and Eric Rubin, the Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs.

“Our main message was the following: after coming into power of the new authorities, relations between Georgia and the United States will only change into positive direction,” Usupashvili told journalists after the meetings.

Eric Rubin, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, said after the meeting with Usupashvili: “I told him that we very much admired his leadership and the leadership of his team in the Parliament; that we know that they’ve had many difficult challenges in recent months; that we appreciated the work that he had done together with leaders of the opposition on the resolution on Georgia’s diplomatic foreign policy and security orientation, on its Euro-Atlantic aspirations; that we were strongly supportive of efforts at constitutional reform that are aimed at ensuring the life and stability of this constitution.”

“I also told him that we continue to strongly support the Georgian people with their aspirations for future anchored in the Euro-Atlantic institution; we talked a little bit about our appreciation for Georgia’s commitments to the NATO ISAF effort in Afghanistan,” Rubin said.

This is Usupashvili’s first foreign trip after becoming the Parliamentary Chairman following the October elections. In the United States he is accompanied by two lawmakers from the Georgian Dream parliamentary majority – Tedo Japaridze, the chairman of foreign affairs committee and Irakli Chikovani, who chairs Free Democrats parliamentary faction.