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- [00:00]
Eli Lake
This episode is sponsored by supremacy World War 3. I spend a lot of time explaining why world leaders make the decisions they do. World War 3 lets me feel that weight myself. It's a free to play grand strategy game where you command land, sea and air forces against up to 99 real players. Diplomacy matters as much as firepower. Forge alliances or betray them. Matches unfold over days and and weeks. Download Supremacy World War three for free and see if you've got what it takes to dominate the global battlefield. There's a link in the show notes and a QR on screen if you're watching on video. If you download the game via my link, you will get an exclusive starter pack containing the Elite Bomber seasonal unit which has a value of $25. Author is valid for the next 30 days. Join a real time match today and start writing your own chapter. Modern Military History. Welcome back Breaking History listeners. We've got a returning guest today, in my opinion, one of the great reporters in Washington, Jay Solomon, who is really carved out an expertise on the Long Shadow war and now the hot war with Iran.
- [01:22]
Jay Solomon
You got this.
- [01:23]
Eli Lake
Next year's model Le Javi Odds, Irving Berlin.
- [01:29]
Jay Solomon
What happened once happens again when news appears a mystery.
- [01:42]
Eli Lake
ExpressVPN is like tinted windows for your Internet connection. You can see out but they can't see in. Wouldn't you like the same privacy online? Your Internet service provider sees every single website you visit. Everyone. And in the US they're legally allowed to sell that information to advertisers. That's not a conspiracy theory, it's just a law. ExpressVPN reroutes all your traffic through encrypted servers. So your ISP see your browsing history. Hide your IP address rated number one by CNET and the Verge. One button to turn it on works on every device. 3.49amonth, 12 cents a day. When I'm researching for this show, I'm pulling from a lot of sensitive sources. I don't need my ISP keeping a record of all of it. Protect your online privacy today by visiting Express. ExpressVPN.com BreakingHistory that's E X P R E S S vpn.com BreakingHistory to find out how you can get up to four extra months. ExpressVPN.com BreakingHistory Jay, thank you for coming back on Breaking History for some of our interim programming.
- [03:05]
Jay Solomon
Happy to be here. I love being on Breaking History.
- [03:08]
Eli Lake
Now the reason that Jay is on the show is because he has a banger that has a topic that is close that Jay and I both journalistically have been following now for what, 15 years, more than 15 years. And that is Trita Parsi. He is the founder of the National Iranian American Council. He is a co founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, named for John Quincy Adams, and one of the leading kind of, I don't know, I mean, I wouldn't call it an isolationist foreign policy. I would say that they are really, they don't want America to remain a great power anymore. They want a combination with America's adversaries like Russia, China and of course, Iran. And now Jay has learned that the Trump administration is taking a long, hard look at, at the kind of legal resident status of Trita Parsi, who is not an American citizen. He has had a green card for a quarter century and he is somebody who has yet to get American citizenship, even though he is a founder of an ostensibly Iranian American organization. Jay, tell us about this incredible piece of investigative journalism.
- [04:27]
Jay Solomon
I think it comes into the context that Secretary of State Marco Rubio's office has definitely been looking over the past few months, certainly since the war broke out in late February, at people inside the United States they think either have like direct familial ties to the Islamic Republic or sort of or engaging in propagandistic information warfare on behalf of the administration in Iran. The the Islamic Republic. So we've seen over the past few months at least three cases where relatives or alleged relatives of senior Iranian officials who are sort of living in California or Florida had their green cards revoked and are being processed and deported. The most kind of the biggest example of this were a niece and grand niece, allegedly of General Qassem Soleimani, the late commander of Iran's Quds forces. I will say they're denying they have any familial ties. So that's playing out in the Texas courtroom. But Trita Parsi is another person that I learned both through US Officials and through documents that they're looking at. The Rubio State Department is looking at because of this role he plays of seemingly sort of being the carrier of Iranian talking points. And this is something probably you and I have been tracing for a while, but it's in the case of Parsi. It's not just that he's kind of, you know, his voice is seems to be allied so closely with the regime. It's also that his organization, organizations related to his brother in Europe, you know, seem to be integrated in a lot of ways with the Islamic Republic. And when one of the more interesting things I Remember you reporting it a while ago? Eli was, you know, he actually got in a lawsuit in 2009 because someone was accusing him of being that his organization should be registered as a foreign agent. He sued them. But during the court case, a bunch of documents came out that actually did show how closely he was coordinating in this case with the UN Ambassador who became Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif. So it's in this context that the Rubio State Department has been looking at, you know, should he be deported? And it is very strange that he's lived in the US since 2000 and doesn't have American citizenship. Lawyers I've talked to said you'd almost have to make that choice of not wanting to be a US citizen after that long. And maybe it's because he doesn't want the scrutiny, but that would be involved with going through the process.
- [07:10]
Eli Lake
I want to just add a little bit to that because what we're talking about with Trita Parsi is not just a matter of somebody who writes op eds and goes on television and podcasts and makes the case. That sounds always a lot like what you would be hearing from Iran's Foreign Ministry. It seems like almost always that is the case with Trita, because that does get into a tricky kind of question of free speech, even if he's not an American citizen. And I'm a very broad First Amendment supporter. And my view is that the, I think 1956 law or whatever, the law that their State Department has said gives them the right to kind of the Secretary, this incredible authority to revoke a green card and permanent legal status from non citizens in America based on whether or not he determines they're undermining American foreign policy to me is way too broad a definition. And I take the view that constitutionally our speech is protected in the land of America, not just for US citizens who happen to live in America. That's my view. You can call me a softie or a civil libertarian, but that's where I come down. Okay, But Trita Parsi is a lot more than that, because starting under the George W. Bush administration, it was Trita who would arrange the meetings with Javad Zarif when he was the ambassador for Iran at the United nations to meet with senators. He was somebody who was literally working. I mean, you saw pictures of him during the negotiations of jcpoa, which with the Iranian delegation. There was a lot more that was going on there than just simply an academic making arguments that I disagreed with or you disagreed with. Would you. Would you agree with that. And can you maybe expand on that idea?
- [09:06]
Jay Solomon
Yeah, I mean, I think I, I covered those nuclear negotiations in 20, 2014, 2015 extremely closely. And yeah, you'd go to these events, you'd go to these meetings in Lausanne, Switzerland or Vienna and you'd see Trita Parsi there and he was always accompanied by another member of nyac, a guy named Reza Morashi. So you kind of had that just from a journalist. I always felt like, wow, this feels like this is being coordinated between the Islamic Republic and some of these people. But a few years ago, almost by like a miracle, there was a large dump of Iranian Foreign Ministry emails that came out. This is in 2023. And I had access to them along with some journalists from Iran International, this sort of opposition Persian language television channel. And lo and behold, when you vetted through these emails, there was something called the Iran Experts Initiative, which was a group of diaspora, either European or Iranian Americans who are part of this group called the Iran Experts Initiative. And sure enough that in the emails you could see the Islamic Republic closely coordinating its messaging with a lot of these people who were showing up at these nuclear talks. And what was really one of the kind of bombshells that kind of came out of this too is that Trita's brother, a Swedish based academic named Roozbe, was essentially the guy who set the Iran Experts Initiative up. Some of the people listed it, one of the person listed in it was this guy, Reza Morashi. So it went from just like God, you know, it seems like these guys are aligned ideologically, that, wow, they are actually coordinating, there's an organizational body to this. And the fallout from that revelation has been kind of strange. The only entity that I can see that really investigated it was Roos based, Parsi's think tank in Stockholm, the Swedish Institute on International Affairs. They like heavily, they hired outside lawyers last year and really went at it and they ended up firing Roozbay Parsi because he said he was running this thing without telling anyone, not his bosses, not the Swedish government. He then came up with a story that the British government was the one funding it. They concluded that wasn't true. So like you said, it's not just that there's similar language, similar talking points. There was actually an organizational coordinating entity between these kind of pundits, whether in Washington or in Europe, and the Iranian Foreign Ministry and Zarif. And when the story came out in 2023, it did cause a big boom, but it just didn't seem like there was that much follow up on the US even though there was in Europe.
- [12:00]
Eli Lake
Well, I mean. And we should talk about Ariane Tashaps. I'm going to screw up her last name. Can you tell me who that this is? Somebody who was ending up, who ended up as a Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and low intensity conflict or she worked in that office that, by the way, Chief of Staff. She was the Chief of staff, I should say.
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Jay Solomon
Yeah.
- [12:20]
Eli Lake
Known as Solick at the Pentagon. That is the Pentagon's Special Ops. I mean they are some of the most highly sensitive stuff. A lot of that's done through Joint Special Operations Command or JSOC or Special Operations Command in general. But the idea that this person who was part of an Iranian information war operation had such a sensitive position in the US Government was really stunning. And the Biden administration, when this came out, if I'm not really didn't do anything about it. But she eventually did lose her job. Right?
- [13:03]
Jay Solomon
I mean, it's kind of weird with the Biden administration. I mean, the thing about Tabataba that was interesting is the IEI members would say, oh, you know, it was just like an informal get together where we'd have access. But in these emails, she's like seeking guidance from the Iranian Foreign Ministry on foreign trips and whether she should go to Israel and essentially what she should, you know, should she take part in a US Congressional hearing. Others were saying they were going to ghostwrite pieces for the Iranians. So yes, some of the most damaging emails in those emails were related to Ron Tabatabai who had this, like you said, it was one of the most sensitive jobs in the Pentagon. And she stayed on throughout the Biden administration in the Pentagon. Then when the Republicans under Trump came in, Senator Cotton in particular, really kind of when he became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he said like, you know, there's, he said to Hegseth, the secretary,
- [14:02]
Eli Lake
is it Senate Armed Services Intelligence? I'm sorry, Senate Intel. Right.
- [14:07]
Jay Solomon
Yeah.
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Eli Lake
Right.
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Jay Solomon
So he really. It's kind of unclear exactly when Tabatabai left if it was. I think she was still in there for at least a little bit, either officially or she was also a naval intelligence officer. So there's one thing I heard that she was still had access to intelligence as a, as a kind of a naval, as a, as a reservist. But they, Cotton really put the hammer down last year saying, you know, these IEI members can't have access to some of this intelligence. So it's kind of. So yeah, like you said, it was not like there were just Random people who were part of this iei, some of them had very senior jobs.
- [14:47]
Eli Lake
And Trita is sort of the guy who is, at least on the US Side, one of the centers of this, you know, very much of a kind of pro Iran line that again, there are American citizens who get there, you know, on their own and they're not getting necessarily paid. This is a point of view. In fact, maybe it's worth just taking a little bit for the backstory here before we really dive into some more of the incredible details in your piece. We should say that after 9 11, an informal group, including the editor at the time of the New York Review of Books, the president of the Carnegie foundation, you know, various like really big deal types of think tanks, former foreign policy hands, did something called, I think it was the Iran Initiative, which was the idea was to think kind of a big grand strategy. We were just attacked by Sunni jihadists, al Qaeda on 9 11. Is this an opening for America to bury the hatchet with the Iranian regime? And you have to remember in 2001, there is still, albeit weakened and emasculated reform government in Iran, which means that this is still President Ayatollah Ali Khadi Khatami is the only reformer really, that has been elected to the presidency in Iran. He, we should say, campaigned in a very as a liberalizer. He had enormous support from students and others who wanted to change and to sort of have Iran. He had an idea called the Dialogue of Civilizations. And there were a lot of people in the late 1990s elected in 1997 and in this period, including after 9 11, that believed that Iran maybe was ready to come out of the cold. Is that fair, would you say?
- [16:43]
Jay Solomon
Yeah, it was. Iran's ready to come out from the cold. And like you said, we're at war with Sunni Islam, the Iranians and Shia.
- [16:51]
Eli Lake
And we should say historically, if you read your Quran and you read your Hadiths, you know that there is, you know, one of the great stories in the history of civilization is the martyrdom of Hussein and Ali and the fight over the proper kind of like the. What should be the line of the caliphate? Should it be hereditary, which is what the Shia believe from the Prophet Muhammad, or should it be among the Prophet Muhammad and his companions and his original disciples? I am summarizing there. I am not myself a Muslim, but I try to learn about various world religions, as everyone should. But so there is an argument.
- [17:34]
Jay Solomon
Well, specific to Afghanistan too, is like, okay, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard had had fights with the Taliban over The border. I think there were some. It was. So there was. It was not just theological. There was like a military component to it.
- [17:49]
Eli Lake
Right now, this turned out so we should say in the moment, in 2001, in that late 90s, early 2000s period, I understand why some people believe that this was an opportunity. This would have been a smart move. The problem is that the real power in Iran was never the presidency. It was always the supreme Leader. The supreme Leader who was killed in the opening salvo of the latest Iran war. But he was somebody who I think we could say was just kind of fanatically and ideologically inflexible when it came to the idea of America as a great Satan and that he. The Iranians were not behind 9 11, but they certainly had contacts with Al Qaeda and they didn't always have a relationship with Al Qaeda that was competitive or we weren't always fighting with Al Qaeda. And what we learned much later on, but in the same period that this Iran kind of policy rethink was going on, was that the Iranian regime had opened their doors to the wives of bin Laden and the number two, Ayman al Zawahiri of Al Qaeda, that a very senior Al Qaeda operative and commander named Saif Al, who I believe is still in Iran, was given safe haven. He was allowed to plan operations against U.S. forces in Iraq from Iran. All of this kind of comes out in subsequent years. So the Iranians are playing a bit of a double game, which is what they're very good at, which is where we get back to Trita Parsi, which is to say that the people who have the real power, the Revolutionary Guard Corps, the supreme Leader, the real state, the shot callers, are willing to work with Al Qaeda because they're an enemy of the United States. But the Foreign Ministry and the people that they present to the west, like Javad Zarif, who speaks fluent English and is, you know, very knowledgeable about international law and, you know, knows how to talk to people like John Kerry, the former Secretary of State and senator, present this. We want to work it out with you guys. You know, oh, this is just this nuclear program. I mean, this isn't for weapons. There was a fatwa. This is the classic kind of double game, and a lot of people fell for it. And that's where treat of Parsi is important to the broader Iranian regime strategy. Would you agree with that?
- [20:31]
Jay Solomon
Yeah, I mean, I think one example from the time frame, certainly post, you know, post Saddam Hussein's falls, there's an unbelievable amount of pressure on the Iranian regime. The US is in Afghanistan and in Iraq. You know, there were people in the Trump administration, sorry in the Bush administration who said let's take them out. And all of a sudden there is this story and you can see it in some of those emails that came out in that lawsuit from 2009 that you wrote about where they're actually, there's a secret grand bargain that the Iranians have put out and it's, they're going
- [21:05]
Eli Lake
to give us everything. The Swiss ambassador in Tehran who was representing our interests was, you know, he was telling us there's a deal that we could have and because I talked to a cousin of the Supreme Leader, you know, whatever.
- [21:16]
Jay Solomon
But it wasn't just like a deal, it was like we'll give up all of our proxies, we'll give up the nuclear program. And you could see in those emails that Trito is really pushing that. And like I just talked to U.S. officials at the time, they said we don't believe it's real and it's feels like it's disinformation, it's the regime floating this stuff to reduce the pressure from the US And Trito was absolutely at the center of that. And you could see it in those emails that he was kind of liaison liaising with Javad Zarif who was the UN ambassador to push that line. So that's one of the best, really concrete examples of this.
- [21:50]
Eli Lake
Yeah, so they were talking, this goes back, you know, 20 years and the story that there was an offer that the hot headed neocons in the Bush administration just didn't even pursue became canon. For Elaine Chalino and all of the high end reporters on Iran in Washington and for the big newspapers and big media outlets this became, I mean Christiana Amanpour went to Iran after Khatami wins or for the election and she was one of these people who was really pushing how this is an opportunity, he could be their Gorbachev, that kind of thing. So in that environment, Trita kind of already kind of puts himself out there. And that's interesting because the way that he would talk about Nyack and he talks about niac, we should get into this. That's the National Iranian American Council. He said, I formed the National Iranian American Council because I wanted to protect Iranian American civil rights after 911 and the wave of Islamophobia. In other emails when he is planning this organization, he says he wants to create an Iranian aipac. AIPAC of course is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has become toxic for The Democratic party in this election cycle, but that is Jewish Americans largely, but also evangelical Americans, pro Israel Americans using their constitutional rights to petition Congress and support candidates in elections that support a strong U S Israel relationship. Now we should talk about this idea of an Iranian aipac, because that was what NIAC always was. The other stuff was like window dressing. But he manages in this pitch by calling it kind of a civil rights organization interested in bringing the countries together in the kind of spirit of getting medicine. Yeah. That he gets an enormous amount of money from very wealthy, like left wing billionaires. He gets money from the Tides Foundation. He gets money from. So he's getting foundation money. Yeah, exactly. Plowshares is another one. So these are organizations that would normally like, say they support, you know, I don't know, human rights in Africa and nuclear freeze and climate awareness and things like that. But now they're supporting a group that is effectively a lobby for warming ties with Iran and lifting sanctions on Iran and negotiations and grand bargaining with Iran. So that's. We should just throw that out there. He seduces the left, even though, interestingly enough, Trita Parsi, when he comes first, kind of comes to Washington, he is somebody who works for Bob Ney, who is a Republican, a disgraced Republican who
- [25:05]
Jay Solomon
he went down with. Abramoff, right?
- [25:07]
Eli Lake
Yes, he went down with Abramoff. He went down with kind of one of the early Republican corruption scandals. And you know, Trina manages to walk between the raindrops and kind of, you know, found this new organization. And he finds the new organization with some of the people he knew, he got to know, you know, originally working for Bob Ney. Bob Nay, by the way, has an interesting history with Iran and the Iranian people, which we can get into another time maybe. So that's that. Now here is one of the big flaws of the sort of what NIAC was supposed to be, which is supposed to be, we represent the Iranian American people. And the idea was you would go to Congress and you'd say, listen, Iranian Americans want to lift sanctions. Iranian Americans want this, Iranian Americans want that. You know, that kind of thing. The problem is the people who fled Iran, particularly after the 1979 revolution and around 1978, when the country was going to hell, they hate the mullahs, they left. Yeah. And they fricking hate Nyack. But so it was a scam, you know what I'm saying? The thing is that most American Jews like Israel, there are certainly growing number of them who don't. But most American Jews, you know, you're going to say, hey, the Jewish community likes Israel. Can you do us a solid, Mr. Congressman? Blah, blah, blah treat. His pitch was, I'm representing all these Iranian Americans who want you to take it easy on the Iranians. Where most Iranian Americans I think largely kind of look at it as like, hey, we got the hell out of there. Best thing we ever did. Now let's go make a lot of money in Los Angeles or wherever they are. Right. But if they were thinking about Iran, they were like, yeah, you know what? My new country, America should understand that the people in charge over there are, you know, bloodthirsty lunatics and we should have nothing to do with them. So that's the, that's a huge disconnect. And he got away with that. I think, I think I was the first one in my piece when I wrote it for the Washington Times in 2010 or 29. I forget what year it was, but I was the first one to really kind of put, put it out there.
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Jay Solomon
That wasn't, wasn't part of that too. In the, in the emails that, in the lawsuit they, the, the guy who, who was accused of defamation kept asking for documents about how many people actually support.
- [27:24]
Eli Lake
Oh, that was the most amazing thing.
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Jay Solomon
And they would.
- [27:26]
Eli Lake
Actual membership numbers were like far less than what they claimed there was. Not only that and they wouldn't present
- [27:32]
Jay Solomon
a lot of documents too.
- [27:33]
Eli Lake
Yeah, and they were. And by the way, Trita, to his credit is such a good, like, kind of political operator. He is like at the center of these coalitions. During the Obama transition, they tried to make sure, they tried to prevent him from bringing in Dennis Ross, the longtime who worked for Clinton as the main Oslo peace process negotiator for the US Side. The Obama administration wanted to bring him as one of their senior Middle east envoys, which they ended up doing. But they had a whole nasty campaign about how he shouldn't be involved. They spread it around and they worked with these other kind of typical left wing foreign policy groups and so forth. So I'm just pointing out there that, you know, Trita, very industrious guy. So that's what was kind of going on to give you a sense of what Trita was doing and the fraudulence that NIAC is an organization that really represents a majority of Iranian Americans, that it, when it. And that it spends most of his time, you know, trying to, you know, again, soften US Foreign policy, defang US Foreign policy against Iran. So that was his, that, that was kind of, I would say his mission statement. Eventually he Leaves Nyack. And then he is one of the founders of the Quincy Institute. Now, what is the Quincy Institute? Let's talk about them.
- [28:58]
Jay Solomon
The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
- [29:02]
Eli Lake
Right?
- [29:03]
Jay Solomon
Yeah, I mean, it was created, I mean, he describes it, I've heard him describe it, that they wanted to change US grand strategy away from militarism to diplomacy. I mean, that's kind of. It sounds great, like we want peace, we want talks. But I think sort of a thread through a lot of their research is, you know, take it easy on the Russians, take it easy on the Iranians. Let's, let's stop challenging the Chinese. Like you said, I think early on
- [29:33]
Eli Lake
that's the concept of threat inflation.
- [29:35]
Jay Solomon
Yeah.
- [29:36]
Eli Lake
There's the idea that we're overstating how these countries that every day say how much they hate us, want to do bad things to us or oppose our interests. By the way, I just want to say as a personal note here, you can see I'm getting a little worked up and agitated. Nobody who opposes Quincy Institute policies is against diplomacy. This is the dumbest. I just, let's just, I just want to take a step back. It's being against diplomacy or in favor of war is stupid. I'm in favor of diplomacy when necessary and I am in favor of diplomacy even with enemies if you can get something out of it. And I think we should have a really big military that it can deter our rivals. So the idea that those two things are in tension is ridiculous. I just want to point that out and that diplomacy can be used in all kinds of ways. Historically, the Romans were the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire were very effective at diplomacy, but their diplomacy was dictating terms to weaker states. And if they disagreed, you know, you get the legions. So this is, I just have a problem as a kind of category error. It's like one of these things that, you know, just sort of floats by oftentimes. And we should just say that the concept itself that like, oh, we like diplomacy and we don't like military. Well, you know what? Great powers have both. So what are you telling me? All right, rant over. Okay. So it's interesting, we should say early seed money for the Quincy Institute comes from both the Koch brothers, who are usually associated as sort of the libertarian right. Yeah, they support a lot of Republicans, but also George Soros Open Society Institute, so which supports any number of now incredibly left wing groups, including the progressive prosecutors that wanted to legalize most crime in our big cities. So that's who is sort of, sort of give the first big donations. My understanding now is that Koch has largely walked away from Quincy and that I don't know what the status is right now of Soros. And I'm sure they, I mean, I don't know where else they're getting their money from, but I mean, on their
- [32:17]
Jay Solomon
website they're pretty established. It's like Ford Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, Plowshares Foundation. So it's, some of them are, you know, pretty stalwart, traditional New York ones, along with ones that are way more progressive.
- [32:32]
Eli Lake
So what that, that tells us about the, the, the rot of these traditional American foundations, the fall of some of the great families that built America, the Fords, the Rockefellers are now like supporting this kind of trifling nonsense. This episode is presented by JP Morgan Chase. For over 225 years, JP Morgan Chase has believed one of the greatest investments they've ever made is in America. Because this country's value lies in its people progress potential. Now, through their security and Resiliency Initiative, JPMorgan Chase has announced a $1.5 trillion, 10 year plan to support the infrastructure of American possibility and help strengthen the energy grids and supply chains that drive American ambition and the manufacturing that builds legacy. They're investing in the AI and quantum computing that create progress and in the defense and cybersecurity that protects it all. By supporting these critical industries, JPMorgan Chase is helping to secure the future and fuel intervention across the country. Because when companies like JPMorgan Chase invest in America, they know the returns are limitless. Learn more about their impact@jpmorganchase.com America, like you, we care a lot about craftsmanship at breaking history, how things used to be made and whether that still matters today. Which raises a fair question. Can you still build something, well, on purpose in America? Today's sponsor is doing exactly that. Vare, that's V A E R was founded in Los Angeles with a mission to revive American watchmaking. And they've actually pulled it off. VAIR is now the largest independent watch assembler in the usa, building watches across California, Arizona, Rhode island and Alabama with leather straps made in Illinois and Florida. Now, I have to tell you something. I happen to have a beautiful DS2 Meridian Black Vare. It's quartz, 39 millimeter, and I get compliments on it all the time. I love this watch. And the great thing about it is I know that when I have this watch, I did not pay a premium for a brand name that simply just connotes that I have a lot of money or I am in style or something like that. No, people admire my watch because it looks wonderful, it looks great and it tells time. Great. And one of the things I really like about the watch is that it also is quite durable. It's waterproof, it uses some of the top grade luxury materials that you would expect in your Rolexes or your other more expensive brands. And I can tell you that the public agrees. They've already gotten 10,000 five star reviews. So if you're tired of disposable products and want something that's rugged, timeless and thoughtfully made, check them out. Go to Vare Watches, that's V A E R watches.com and support American craftsmanship. All right, so then you got your hands on some internal Quincy Institute documents. What do they say?
- [35:54]
Jay Solomon
I mean it really in kind of reporting the story. I was like, you know, how serious is this? And it was when I saw these emails or, you know, correspondence, they're taking it really seriously. I mean they've, they're mobilizing all these big foundations, they're hiring high end immigration lawyers, they're getting a writ of habeas corpus ready in case there's a move against Trita. So they're, they're clearly taking this, this seriously. And I think part of the reason they're concerned too is you have as well what's going on in State Department. You have Laura Loomer, this MAGA influencer who's really been going after Treata publicly as well as a lot, a lot of Iranian, American or overseas Iranian diaspora sort of mobilizing against Trita since the war started. I don't know if you saw, I mentioned in the story there are these in Iran and at first I thought they were AI, but they certainly look real. They're these posters of Trita's face on Iranian streets where he's basically, there's a quote tied to him saying, you know, Trump's war is a disaster and it's showing that, you know, US force essentially is, is useless. So you're kind of at a hinge moment where there's a lot of people who have been kind of seeking to defang treat it for a while now. Now they think they have a voice in, in the State Department in Rubio who might actually act on it because a lot of, you know, you've seen it Ted Cruz cotton. For years they've been pushing for an investigation into Trita and to Nyack and now they seem like it looks like they really have one. And certainly, I mean they're taking it seriously.
- [37:36]
Eli Lake
Return briefly to Laura Loomer. Okay, so Laura Loomer has at times embraced, let's just say she's asserted things as fact that are just not true. And she, you know, she can. We're living in the Trump era. So she's one of these people who's influential to the president, who kind of comes from a very different information universe. Let's just say that an irony is that in the first months of the second Trump presidency, it was Laura Loomer who is widely credited for getting Trump to fire Mike Waltz as his first national Security advisor, and many of the sort of senior National Security Council people who are hired to staff up the National Security Council at the White House, which is depending on the presidency. This presidency, National Security Council really doesn't mean anything. But there were times when, you know, the National Security Council, certainly under Obama, was very much, you could argue, more powerful than, like, the State Department. You know, Ben Rhodes is somebody who was a deputy national Security advisor who was resented by defense secretaries and others in the administration for kind of bollocksing up what they thought was the proper policy process. I mention all this because Waltz and the people who worked for Waltz were considered to be traditionalist, primacist. I don't. Wouldn't necessarily say they were neocon, but they were certainly much closer to a Tom Cotton or the old George W. Bush foreign policy than somebody like a JD Vance. And Loomer was the agent who. Who convinced Trump that they were somehow disloyal. Waltz got a consolation prize. He's now the ambassador to the United Nations. But a lot of those people, like Alex Wong and other people that we know, were summarily dismissed from their jobs based on basically the accusation of Laura Loomer. Now, Laura Loomer is going after one of the people who we would say would be one of the sort of longstanding bitter rivals of that crowd. So we should just note that. That Laura Loomer is. Is truly a chaos agent in this respect. Okay.
- [39:57]
Jay Solomon
I think she was at the center of these. Of Suleimani's alleged relatives getting deported or processed. So if that turns out to be
- [40:06]
Eli Lake
how the courts rule on that.
- [40:07]
Jay Solomon
Right, yeah, right. But that's another example of this chaos agent.
- [40:12]
Eli Lake
Okay, all right, now, okay, so, so, so there's there whispering going on and there's something happening. And you. They brought in this lawyer and you got these incredible internal documents which were like, planning to use the think tanks money to defend Trita if it came to some sort of effort to revoke
- [40:33]
Jay Solomon
his green Card, Correct, Correct. But they were fixated on Loomer for sure. Like that. She did have. She did have the power to sort of make this happen. That was pretty clear in these documents.
- [40:46]
Eli Lake
Okay, what else? Now, I want to mention there was something else. I don't know if it was in your piece, but there was something that was on Iranian state television before this round of war that was. There was a great story from iri, Iran International. Everybody should subscribe and read them. They do get the best stuff. I think, at this point to kind of keep us abreast of what's happening inside of Iran, that there was a kind of show where there were like a. It was like a chat show. They're speaking in Farsi, but you see the translation. And they're saying, well, yes, we have that. We have our lobbyist in Washington. I'm paraphrasing here. And it's Trita Parsi. And he, you know, but what has he done for us? Look at what's going. What's. What's about to happen with Trump. Can you talk about that? Like, it's fascinating because it's like the Iranians kind of are omitting it. Like, hey, we had our guy. What happened here?
- [41:38]
Jay Solomon
You know, and they're also like, well, some of this we shouldn't talk on screen. But yeah, yeah, the thing was, I found. Yeah, the other thing I found very interesting about it, they were talking about, well, Rouhani, you know, put this Parsi guy in charge of this lobby. And the timing of it, I don't know if this is to be the truth, but the timing of it is exactly when this Iran Experts initiative was set up. This is like 2014. So I do wonder, is that what they're. Was that part of it? Is this is what they're talking about? Because it does track time wise. And Parsi's brother, as far as we could tell, essentially set the thing up. So, yeah, the Iranian American diaspora jumped on that as kind of former proof, additional proof, that Treaty was essentially working as a Iranian agent. That got a lot of attention. Correct.
- [42:24]
Eli Lake
Okay. Now, I mean, I have written about Trita. I mean, a lot of people in the Iranian kind of human rights world consider him basically a lobbyist for the regime. Would you say that's fair? You quote Laudan Bazargon in your piece.
- [42:42]
Jay Solomon
Yeah, that quote was amazing. She basically says, I think the regime identified these two brothers who were living in Sweden and, you know, go forth and, you know, do these information operations on both sides of the Atlantic.
- [42:56]
Eli Lake
Right.
- [42:56]
Jay Solomon
It Was. It was kind of. Of course they deny it, but from her perspective, it's clear that this was kind of a broader operation. These two brothers who could do very similar things, kind of getting into think tanks and using that to burrow their way into governments in Europe and in the U.S. so, yeah, very similar. Very similar.
- [43:19]
Eli Lake
So this gets to, like, I think a tricky question, which is, I think. I mean, I don't think you haven't found, and I didn't find when I was writing about him, like, you know, God, 15 years ago or whatever, whenever it was more than 15 years ago, actual payments to treat a Parsi from Iranian regime or businesses or think tanks in Iran. So you don't have a. You don't have that. Typically, if you want to prove someone's a foreign agent, you follow the money. But I think there is such a clear. There's so much evidence, circumstantially, just looking at him and getting back to that lawsuit from Dal Salaam, when it was finally settled and Trita had to pay for his lawyer's fees, he lost the defamation suit. One of the things the judge said in the ruling. You want to talk about that? Because I thought that was one of the clearest things, which is that you can't blame someone for thinking that you are basically a lobbyist for the regime.
- [44:18]
Jay Solomon
Yeah, that lawsuit did fail spectacularly. The judge threw it out. But like you said in his concluding arguments, he. He said, like, I can see the way he operates, the way his kind of what, you know, he'll say some things that are kind of mildly critical of the regime. But by and large, the overall message is very much in the regime's. In the regime's favor, that I could see why someone would think you're a lobbyist. It was. Yeah, it was incredibly damning. And worse than that, or not worse than that, but along with that, yeah, he finds Trito almost 200 grand, saying, like, you didn't present. Present the documents that you were requested. You were constantly assembling. Yeah. Altered documents. So it was. It was really damaging in a lot of ways. But the funding stuff is interesting because I've, I need to look at it more. But there is also the question is, have they been using cutouts? Are there other, you know, people in the US who are doing business with Iran or. Or have interest in Iran? Are they funding treatise operations? So the money's not directly coming from the regime? That's something I always thought I should dig up on more.
- [45:28]
Eli Lake
Also, when you're dealing with crowd. When you're dealing with fundraising, especially through the Internet, it's very easy to hide where that money is coming from. This is something that white collar criminals sort of do all the time. So you don't know where some of this money is coming from when someone fills out a form on the web or something like that. Again, these are things that the US Government has the tools to really get to the bottom of that. I think outside journalists are going to be very hard to get that unless you get somebody who's very high up who breaks ranks. Although you had a pretty good source at the Quincy Institute, I should say. All right, so, I mean, let's big picture this now. I think one of the things is that on the one hand, one could argue that the quarter century that Trita Parsi has tried to shape American foreign policy has failed because Americans elected Donald Trump and Donald Trump ultimately decided to kill Qasem Soleimani. He decided to get out of the jcpoa, which is the Iran bargain that Obama did. He decided to do Midnight Hammer and then Epic Fury and as well as maximum economic pressure. And if the headlines today on Thursday, June 11, are correct and Trump follows through, then it looks like we will be back in a very serious hot war. Or we are right now, he has apparently lost his patience with the negotiating track. So in that respect, mazel tov, Trita Parsi. You failed. On the other hand, I think he has succeeded in another way, and that is he has managed to persuade large chunks of the Democratic Party, if not, and is now the main position of the Democratic Party and the populist right, certainly a chunk of the Republican Party maybe, or certainly of the American right, that the best U.S. foreign policy should be to accommodate a regime that murdered in cold blood up to 40, 45,000 of its own citizens in January, that is the world's leading sponsor of terrorism that supports some of the most ghastly fanatics in the Middle east to wage a kind of unrelenting and brutal war against Israel and America's allies. And at least until last a year ago June was pursuing a nuclear weapon. So, and that, I suppose in some ways is an accomplishment that he manages to get. He manages starting after 9 11, when the country is angry and the country is in a fairly hawkish mood to basically take the view that Iran's not really an enemy. What do you think about that?
- [48:36]
Jay Solomon
I would kind of flip that a little bit because I do think if you look from everything street has done, including his books, the kind of common thread is yes, Iran could be a partner, but another, maybe even more important point is that Israel is a liability to the United States. It's only Israel that's blocking peace with Iran. It's only Israel that's blocking stability in the region. And I think on that front, he succeeded. And since the war started, he's kind of turned up the decibel till 12. You know, oh, Israel needs. Is a pariah state. It's genocidal. So I think on that front, he's been successful. And I, I do think an important part of this story that I was picking up, it's kind of like, yeah, there are definitely those inside the administration that would love to deport Trita, but he also, he has made pretty successful inroads into this kind of far right MAGA movement. And, you know, is, are there people in the White House, close to Vance or others who are, who would block any sort of aggressive move against Trita? The fact that a few weeks ago he's appearing in public with Joe Kent, you know, just left the National Counterterrorism center, it kind of shows his inroads into that, into that kind of part of maga. So when you say, yeah, you're right, we're at war with Iran, that's not what Treat has been pushing on. But I do think he's a big part of his push has been to weaken the US Israel relationship. And on that front, I think he's been very successful.
- [50:10]
Eli Lake
Right, right. Well, that is a good place to end it. Jay, congratulations on another blockbuster. As you guys remember, check out. If you haven't listened to our earlier episode where we talked about the journey of one Kala Walsh, the little drummer girl of the 21st century, and read everything Jay writes. I mean, he's one of the best.
- [50:32]
Jay Solomon
Great to see you, Eli.
- [50:33]
Eli Lake
Great to see you, Jay.