NBC News is reporting Rudy Giuliani advocated for an Iranian group that had been on the federal terrorism watchlist while serving as the personal attorney to the President of the United States. For about a decade Giuliani did work for the Iranian group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK). He never registered as a foreign agent.
The MEK has been described as an Iranian, Islamic, socialist militant group. NBC News calls the MEK an “Iranian group with bloody past,” and reports it was a “State Department-designated foreign terrorist organization until 2012,” which would encompass the time Giuliani admits he represented them.
Giuliani, in an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell earlier this year described himself as “one of their top spokespeople,” and NBC says he’s been doing speeches for the organization for over a decade.
“For nearly a decade,” NBC reports, Giuliani and former Giuliani law partner Michael Mukasey, also a former U.S. attorney “have pushed the agenda of the MEK, giving paid speeches and writing newspaper op-eds expressing support for a group linked to the deaths of six Americans in the 1970s.”
“But it wasn’t until late last month that Mukasey registered as a foreign agent lobbying pro bono for MEK’s political arm. Giuliani still hasn’t, raising the possibility that the Justice Department could target him in an illegal lobbying probe, experts say.”
Giuliani met with MEK officials at least once every year since 2014. A range of issues were discussed, including “Iran’s nuclear weapons as well as Iran’s terrorism in the region, including Iraq and Syria” in 2014, the plight of Iranian dissidents living in Iraq in 2015, and the protests in Iran in 2018.
During that period, he has appeared at MEK-related events in Poland, Albania, Paris and Washington. FARA experts say Giuliani’s speech in Washington in May 2018 and U.S.-based writings in support of the group are particularly problematic.
Here is Giuliani last year speaking to the MEK and leading a chant for “regime change” in Iran, barely weeks before officially becoming the president’s personal attorney. Regime change in Iran is not Trump’s official policy.
You can read NBC’s full report here.