In 2014, the International Crisis Group began conducting negotiations with an arm of the Iranian government. The ICG, whose launch was funded by George Soros and whose board of trustees currently includes both Soros and his son, was dealing with the Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS), an arm of the Iranian Foreign Ministry, whose leader had hailed the Hamas massacres, rapes and kidnappings of Oct 7 as a “glorious victory”.
IPIS has been linked to compromising a future Pentagon Chief of Staff, and other key figures around Robert Malley, Biden’s Iran envoy, and a former president of the Soros organization, who had been removed from the Obama campaign for his contacts with Hamas for the ICG, and who is currently under FBI investigation for allegedly mishandling classified materials.
Ali Vaez, the Crisis Group’s current Iran director, was allegedly shown in a leaked email that same year writing to then Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif in the name of the Crisis Group that “as an Iranian I considered it my national and patriotic duty to offer His Excellency help to publicly oppose the breakout time concept”. Breakout time refers to the amount of time it would take Iran to produce enough materials for a nuclear weapon that could kill millions of Americans.
By 2016, the ICG and the Iranian government arm had quietly signed a Memorandum of Understanding to “promote and intensify the friendship and the mutual understanding” with the Soros group. When asked about the MOU, the ICG refused to discuss it. While such MOUs are usually signed with governments, the ICG served as a ‘state within a state’ in the United States government, and key figures from the Soros group, like Malley, occupied governmental roles.
It is illegal for organizations in the United States to act as arms of foreign governments, especially hostile ones, without disclosing their activities and registering as foreign agents.
The ICG and the Soros family did not do so.
Foreign Minister Zarif in his memoirs described the Soros funded and overseen ICG acting as lobbyists for the terrorist state.
“A decision was made to discreetly share an additional unofficial copy with the group through a liaison linked to the US delegation and members of the International Crisis Group,” the former Iranian government official wrote. “This step was taken to ensure that the International Crisis Group could lay the foundation for publicizing and lobbying the draft’s content.”
The ICG has denied that it lobbied for the Iranian government even after Zarif’s admission, however one nuclear expert described the Soros group inviting him to an event at Iran’s UN mission and the group has admitted inviting “staff from congress” as well as “journalists” to “meetings with Iran’s Foreign Ministry”.
George Soros and some ICG backers and board members were also major donors to elected officials, political campaigns as well as nonprofit groups working on diplomatic and nuclear issues. ICG invitations implicitly leveraged this political and philanthropic influence on Iran’s behalf that was partly gained from its nonprofit status.
The International Crisis Group is a 501(c)(3), a charitable status that provides a great deal of potential benefits for its donors and staff, but that bars any illegal activities or violations of the law. That includes inappropriate ties with terrorist groups, sanctioned enemy nations and any failure to register as foreign agents when lobbying on behalf of a foreign nation
Former ICG President Robert Malley had been kicked off the Obama campaign because he had maintained contacts with Hamas on behalf of the Soros group. Malley has now been sidelined once again, this time over alleged accusations of mishandling classified documents. Reports allege that Malley, while serving under Obama, “kept using Vaez to send messages to” Zarif.
Dina Esfandiary, an ICG senior advisor on the Middle East, had been previously exposed collaborating with an Iranian IPIS project known as the ‘Iran Experts Initiative (IEI)’ meant to influence American officials. Ali Vaez, ICG’s Iran director, has also been involved in the IEI and that combined with his email in which he discusses aiding Iran as part of his “national and patriotic duty” paints a troubling picture of the allegiances of the ICG’s point man on Iran.
These things combined with the covert Memorandum of Understanding, provide a basis for not only an IRS investigation into ICG’s nonprofit status, but also a FARA investigation by the Department of Justice.
The Foreign Agents Registration Act or FARA guidelines cover anyone who tries to influence American policy or public opinion “at the order, request, or under the direction or control of a foreign principal”. Did the ICG meet that definition? The new admissions by Iranian government officials and the documents and emails being published by Jay Solomon, the former chief foreign affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, at Semafor and by Iranian dissident media at Iran International, offer a damning portrait of an organization where red lines had been crossed in its relationship with an enemy nation responsible for the murder of Americans.
Our national security has been rotted through by agents of influence and foreign governments that have infiltrated our universities, embedded themselves within think tanks and captured D.C. As we face a growing conflict with Iran, it’s time to end the enemy’s grip on our foreign policy and to hold those individuals and organizations who have enabled the terror state accountable.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center has spent the past two years reporting on how the IRS has undermined national security by allowing foreign governments, terrorist groups, both foreign and domestic, and their allies to function as nonprofits and benefit from that nonprofit status.
We will now also be pursuing the failure of the International Crisis Group to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act with a complaint to the Department of Justice and its FARA enforcement unit. George Soros and his partners and allies must face a day of justice.
{Reposted from FrontPageMag}
