The Ongoing Harassment of Iran Policy Critics

A State Department official made an outrageous and false accusation against Jason Rezaian, the well-known reporter at The Washington Post, and Sima Ladjevardian, the Democratic candidate for the House in Texas’ Second District. Rezaian had written an earlier column on Ladjevardian’s campaign because she has a chance to become the first Iranian-American member of Congress. This official, Ellie Cohanim, falsely accuses Ladjevardian of being a “mouthpiece” for the Iranian government, and she “proves” this by citing a positive column Rezaian wrote about her candidacy.

It reflects just how awful things have become at the State Department under Pompeo that someone who flings accusations of dual loyalty against Iranian-Americans is the deputy special envoy responsible for “combating” anti-Semitism. Cohanim was tweeting on her personal account, but government officials shouldn’t ever be making accusations like this against journalists or candidates or any other American. This is the latest instance of harassment of critics of the administration’s Iran policy. This was already happening with taxpayer funding through the so-called Iran Disinformation Project. While the project ostensibly existed to counter Iranian government propaganda, it was mostly used to smear journalists and analysts when they questioned the administration’s reckless policy towards Iran. Rezaian was one of the targets of this campaign of harassment as well. He wrote about this last year:

So we’re faced with the irony that an initiative aimed at combating Tehran’s disinformation campaigns is resorting to disinformation campaigns of its own, using taxpayer funds to spread lies about U.S. citizens. We need programs that fight the spread of falsehoods and propaganda, but such efforts shouldn’t combat lies with other lies — and certainly not with public funding.

The State Department has cancelled the funding for this project, but it has also continued to use some of the people involved in it.

No doubt Rezaian is unpopular with the administration because he has criticized their destructive Iran policy many times. As a former prisoner of the Iranian government, he has absolutely no love for the government that wrongfully detained him for 18 months, but he also has no sympathy for a policy of collective punishment that hurts ordinary Iranians. Ladjevardian is probably being targeted here because there is a possibility that she might unseat Rep. Dan Crenshaw, one of the president’s most reliable yes-men in the House, and because she is Iranian-American. This would not be the first time that officials in this administration targeted someone at least partly because of her Iranian heritage. The egregious mistreatment of Sahar Nowruzzadeh at the State Department occurred early on in the Trump presidency. The State Department’s Inspector General found that she was the target of political retaliation because of her heritage and her support for the nuclear deal.

Attacking other Americans as “mouthpieces” of foreign governments because they criticize our government’s policies or simply because of their ethnicity is deeply wrong and toxic behavior. This is the sort of thing that officials in authoritarian states do when faced with internal dissent: they attack the loyalty and patriotism of the dissenters. It is unfortunately typical of what we have come to expect from Iran hawks both inside and outside the administration. It has no place at the State Department or anywhere else in our government. Cohanim owes Rezaian and Ladjevardian a public apology, and then she should resign.