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New York Times Writer Arrested As Secret Iran Agent Acknowledges He Was Paid By Iranian Government
[Algemeiner] The frequent New York Times ...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize... opinion contributor who was arrested earlier this month and charged with acting as an unregistered foreign agent of the Iranian government acknowledges that he was paid by the Iranian mission at the United Nations ...the Oyster Bay money pit... "I received checks from the Mission’s UN account and it never occurred to me that I was doing anything illegal," the New York Times opinion writer, Kaveh Afrasiabi, wrote in a statement to the Algemeiner. He called the government’s claim that he was a secret Iranian agent "absurd" and "wild." "Whatever I did was perfectly legal and fully transparent," Afrasiabi said, saying that he had believed the Foreign Agents Registration Act "only applied to those engaging in lobbying efforts on behalf of a foreign government, which I never did." A New York Times spokesperson did not respond to a query about whether the newspaper, which according to a search on its website Monday morning had not yet covered the federal criminal complaint against [Kaveh] Afrasiabi, plans to tell its readers about the situation. The spokesperson also did not respond to a question about whether the newspaper plans to publish an editor’s note indicating that the opinion pieces came from someone who was getting paid by the Iranian government. Afrasiabi said the payments from the Iranian government — about $265,000 since 2007, plus health insurance coverage, federal prosecutors alleged — had not swayed his writing. "At no point in my professional career, I have been moved by anything other than my rather puritanical moral responsibility as an intellectual," he said. Related: New York Times: 2021-01-26 Rupert Murdoch Condemns ‘Awful Woke Orthodoxy' and Social Media ‘Censorship' in Speech New York Times: 2021-01-26 Pres. Trump Won't Start a Third Party, but Instead Will Target Never-Trump Republicans New York Times: 2021-01-26 The River of Forgetfulness: Victor Davis Hanson Posted by: trailing wife 2021-01-28 |
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