Trita Parsi, the founder and president of the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC)–an alleged pro-Iranian regime lobbying group–has been spotted in Switzerland engaging in conversation with the Ayatollah’s delegation.
Photos snapped by Iran’s state-run Fars News Agency show Parsi gleefully engrossed in a chitchat with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s brother.
Another photo captured by Fars News shows Parsi walking closely behind the Iranian delegation.
Internal documents revealed as part of a failed lawsuit against an Iranian dissident journalist that Parsi and NIAC have been maintaining a years-long relationship with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif.
The fact that NIAC has an active and supportive relationship with top Iranian officials have led some to allege that the Washington, D.C., lobbying group has been siding with Ayatollah Khamenei’s Islamic Republic over the United States. Therefore, the group should be registered as a foreign agent, some have concluded.
The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires that organizations representing foreign countries must register with the Justice Department’s Foreign Agent Registration Unit. To date, NIAC has not registered as a foreign agent for the Iranian regime.
Parsi has been traveling in and out of Switzerland since 2013 and has been engaging in a sustained campaign to convince the P5+1 world powers to sign a nuclear deal with the terror state, BuzzFeed reported.
NIAC’s rhetoric shows that the alleged pro-Ayatollah organization is a virulently anti-Israel group. In February, the group took out a full-page ad in the New York Times that asked whether Benjamin Netanyahu or Barack Obama was the president of the United States. The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby’s described the ad as one that “plays the disloyalty card.”
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