Bolton once argued for a preemptive military strike to wipe out Iran’s nuclear program and received $40,000 in 2016 to speak before the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a radical anti-regime organization formerly designated as a terrorist group by the United States.
The senators note that Giuliani also lobbied to help the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, an Iranian opposition group, win removal from a State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, and has advocated for regime change in Iran, one of the group’s top goals. His recent clients include the government of Qatar, which is aggressively working to influence Trump, and he …
After a few months of will-they-won’t-they tension, the US State Department decided on Friday to officially remove the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) from the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list, which the Iranian exile group has been on for the past 15 years…well-funded MEK backers also received a lobbying assist from high-powered international PR firm Brown Lloyd James..
MEK aka MKO/PMOI has American blood on its hands, but today the group is reportedly a huge help to Israel in assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists—perhaps part of the reason it is being delisted. Memo to terror groups: If you want to get off the US terrorism list, make sure you kill the”right”civilians and offer generous speaking fees.
MEK’s supporters have included Andrew Card, Howard Dean, John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani, Bill Richardson, Wesley Clark, and many others. And the MEK has treated some of them very nicely. According to a March report by NBC’s Michael Isikoff, pro-MEK speakers can earn up to”$30,000 or more per talk and first-class flights to European capitals.”(The office of former Pennsylvannia Governor Ed Rendell, just one such speaker, told Isikoff that he’d earned $160,000 in 2011 ..
You may think this was a bad ruling. But a ruling it is, and it’s the law of the land. And yet, a large cast of worthies, including Rudy Giuliani, Howard Dean, Michael Mukasey, Ed Rendell, Andy Card, Lee Hamilton, Tom Ridge, Bill Richardson, Wesley Clark, Michael Hayden, John Bolton, Louis Freeh, and Fran Townsend have actively lobbied for MEK and have apparently done it in coordination with MEK’s leadership.
During Mitt Romney’s last month’s lackluster debate performance with a town hall in New Hampshire, an audience member asked the potential Republican nominee if he supported Mitt Romney efforts by prominent political leaders in Washington to remove the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, an Iranian dissident terrorist group, from the State Department’s list of designated terrorist organizations…If Romney has truly never heard of the MEK, he won’t have to..