October 08, 2021
The federal prosecutor handling the US case against Kaveh Afrasiabi for acting as a paid agent of the Islamic Republic says the government has recordings of 33,000 telephone calls Afrasiabi made over more than a decade, indicating a massive wiretap effort by the federal government.
Afrasiabi is accused of accepting more than a quarter million dollars from the Islamic Republic to write articles propagandizing its cause without registering as a foreign agent of Iran. Anyone in the United States is permitted to do what Afrasiabi did, but the law requires they must register as a foreign agent if they are paid to do so.
Afrasiabi pleaded not guilty in February after being arrested at his Boston-area home.
At an August 25 status hearing, a US attorney handling the case, Ian Richardson, said he was preparing to turn over to the defense 33,000 audio recordings of Afrasiabi. An August 27 letter said that in addition to the audio recordings, the government is turning over Internal Revenue Service, health insurance, and banking records.
Afrasiabi told The Alge- meiner in an email that the recordings are “the sum of all my phone calls over 13 years, maybe even longer. I have better things to do than to listen to my own calls to my family, friends etc. A giant waste of time.”
The Algemeiner reported that the federal judge hearing the case, Edward Korman, praised Afrasiabi and admonished the government for dragging out discovery in the case. “For a pro se defendant, you’ve been terrific,” the judge told Afrasiabi. “I have an assistant US attorney who is dragging out discovery to no end.”
Korman said Afrasiabi faced a “worst case scenario” maximum sentence of five years, a little over four years with time off for good behavior. Afrasiabi’s standby lawyer, Deirdre Von Dornum, said the prospect that Afrasiabi, who is a permanent resident of the US, could be deported to Iran if convicted, “terrifies me and Dr. Afrasiabi.”
Korman wondered aloud, “Do we actually, given our view of the Iranian government, deport people to Iran?”
The judge lifted a court-ordered curfew that had applied to Afrasiabi. “He’s not going to skip to Iran. If he wanted to run elsewhere he would have done so already,” Judge Korman said.
Judge Korman also cautioned Afrasiabi against incautious remarks. When Afrasiabi started talking about how he had participated in Track Two diplomacy under the auspices of the United Nations Association of the USA, Korman cut him off. “Half of the things you say are self-incriminating,” the judge said. “You should be careful, because everything you say can be used against you.”
Prosecutors say he was paid approximately $265,000 by the Iranian UN mission since 2007 and also received health insurance benefits. Afrasiabi has acknowledged to The Algemeiner that he received the money.
Afrasiabi has insisted that the articles were written not as Iranian propaganda but as “an agent of peace committed to US-Iran reconciliation and peace and dialogue.” In a court affidavit, Afrasiabi wrote, “I never wrote any book or article at the instruction of Iran Mission, nor did I ever waiver from my own independent standards in my publications. At times, my writings were at variance with Iran’s positions.”
The prosecution says Afrasiabi sent drafts of articles he was writing to Iranian diplomats and incorporated many of the changes they proposed.
Afrasiabi told RT, formerly Russia Today, he believes he has fallen victim to political gamesmanship and that the timing of the charges—they were filed two days before the end of the Trump Administration—indicates it was part of Washington’s “maximum pressure strategy” against Iran. The case against him “in many ways has to do with the hostility between the US and Iran,” Afrasiabi told RT.
“They were aware of my activity as consultant to Iran’s [UN] mission on international affairs issues since 2007, which raises an interesting question of why did they wait for 13 years to bring these charges,” he said.
If his work was somehow illegal, the US Department of Justice could have ordered him to register as a “foreign agent” years ago – as it repeatedly did to other individuals and entities, he argued.