Rudy Giuliani with MEK leader Maryam Rajavi
I hate to say anything nice about Rudy Giuliani but the Democratic Party’s criticism [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2016/11/15/giuliani-was-paid-advocate-for-shady-iranian-dissident-group/?utm_term=.bcf8e32e5639] of his ties to the MEK (Mujahadin e Khalq) is serious hypocrisy: then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took MEK off the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) in 2012 just before the 2012 November election just in time to curry favor with the Iranian expatriate community: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2012/09/198443.htm
MEK Soldiers
I had long advocated this step. MEK should never have been on the FTO list in the first place! I wrote about this in at least two past blogs:
and more importantly at:
http://janbtucker.com/blog/2010/05/12/elena-kagan-nomination-is-scary/
In the latter blog I wrote that:
In order to be listed as an FTO, the group has to have committed at least one of a whole list of violations of federal law, with some nexus to having harmed America or Americans. I did Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act requests to the Justice Department, Department of Defense, FBI, CIA, and State Department to try to elicit any evidence they had that MEK had EVER violated one of those laws. Their response: NADA, NOTHING, ZIP.
The Catch 22 is, when the State Department designated MEK as an FTO, it failed to give the organization notice as required by the law itself. They contested the designation and the Supreme Court threw it out on the technicality that no notice was given. So the State Department promptly re-designated MEK as an FTO and gave it notice. By this time, not trusting the U.S. government to play fairly, MEK had moved out of the country. When it was re-designated, it didn’t bother to contest the issue for a second go-round.
Rudy Giuliani is undoubtedly a pig, a racist, and a sexist, but on this issue he’s been on the right side.
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