Jay Solomon
The Free Press / June 11, 2026
He is one of Washington’s most quoted opponents of the Iran War. The administration is weighing whether to revoke his green card, with some officials arguing he isn’t just another pundit.
Since the United States and Israel went to war against Iran, perhaps no one in America has been quoted more often as a critic of the conflict than Trita Parsi, co-founder of the think tank Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
From the far-left Democracy Now! and The Nation to Steve Bannon’s pro-MAGA War Room podcast to television networks CNN, MS NOW, and Al-Jazeera, Parsi has said again and again that President Donald Trump faces a quagmire in Iran and that diplomatic accommodation with Tehran’s ayatollahs and generals is the only way out. Parsi’s writing in Quincy’s online magazine and his own newsletter on Substack also reports what he describes as threats to the U.S. from the Islamic Republic, often attributing them to “sources in the Iranian capital.”
“Tehran is likely to target American data centers in the UAE,” he wrote in May, essentially warning the U.S. and Israel not to abandon the ceasefire that took effect in April by resuming attacks against Iran. “Tehran sees an opportunity to cripple the UAE’s ambitions to become a global artificial intelligence hub.”
In the eyes of some inside the Trump administration, Parsi isn’t just another Washington pundit eager to share his point of view. The State Department has launched an investigation of Parsi and could try to deport him, according to U.S. officials and documents reviewed by The Free Press. Parsi was born in Iran, grew up in Sweden, has lived in the U.S. for over 25 years, and holds a green card.
“The secretary has been very clear,” said a Trump administration official about Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s efforts to combat Iranian influence inside the U.S. “Anyone who seeks to undermine the U.S., we’re taking a hard look at.” That includes “people who support adversaries of ours and whose work furthers their agenda and undermines our security.”
Administration officials have already begun deportation proceedings against other U.S. green-card holders they consider to be aiding or sympathetic to Iran. In April, the State Department said that federal agents had arrested the niece and grandniece of Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian terror commander killed in a 2020 air strike ordered by Trump. The women are fighting their deportation and deny that they are related to Soleimani. The U.S. also cancelled the visa of the daughter of Ali Larijani, leader of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council until his assassination by an Israeli air strike in March.
Also in April, federal agents detained and revoked the green cards of relatives of Masoumeh Ebtekar, a former leader of the Iranian student movement that seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 and took 52 Americans hostage. Ebtekar’s fiery diatribes earned her the nickname “Screaming Mary.” Ebtekar’s son and his family were granted visas and then lawful permanent resident status by the Obama administration, Rubio wrote on X.
Many opponents of the Iranian regime especially welcomed the arrests of the two women, since Soleimani oversaw Tehran’s global terrorism operations. But there also is concern that the Trump administration is using the threat of deportation to silence critics of the war. The lawyer representing the women said that their civil liberties and due-process rights were blatantly violated.
“What is chilling here is that the administration, through the secretary of state, can make any allegation against a lawful permanent resident, revoke their legal status, and seek their removal from the United States without having to offer a single piece of evidence,” the lawyer, Sam Faragalla, told The Free Press. The two women are seeking their release from a Texas detention center to continue fighting the deportation order.
The U.S. government has the power, under federal immigration law, to deport any noncitizen who could create “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” Last year, Rubio asserted that a provision in the law allows the secretary of state to “personally determine that the alien’s presence or activities would compromise a compelling U.S. foreign policy interest,” even when what the person says or believes is entirely legal.
Rubio made that assertion as part of the government’s attempt to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student who was a leader of anti-Israel protests. An appeals court ruling earlier this month allows the government to detain and try to deport Khalil, but the detention was put on hold while he asks the Supreme Court to hear his case.
Parsi and people close to him clearly see the State Department investigation as a serious threat.
Parsi, 51, has long drawn the ire of many Iranian Americans, who believe he uses his residency and legitimacy in the U.S. to amplify the regime’s talking points. Some Republicans and anti-regime activists have been pursuing Parsi for years.
In 2020, senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Mike Braun of Indiana, and Ted Cruz of Texas said a separate group that was started by Parsi in the early 2000s and supported diplomatic accommodation between Washington and Tehran was “amplifying regime propaganda in the United States.” That group is called the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). The three lawmakers sought a Justice Department investigation of whether NIAC was illegally working as an unregistered foreign agent. No investigation or enforcement action was ever announced.
Parsi has always denied any wrongdoing, and denounced the criticism as an effort to silence anyone who dares to speak out against the Trump administration’s policies on Iran. NIAC called the letter by the U.S. senators a “McCarthyite targeting of an Iranian American civil rights organization,” and said it is a crucial voice for those who don’t want war in their home country.
But Parsi and people close to him clearly see the State Department investigation as a serious threat. Quincy CEO Lora Lumpe told the think tank’s employees and financial supporters in April that its chairman had agreed with her request to “cover the legal costs to prepare for—and if necessary—fight a deportation attack on Trita,” according to a memo reviewed by The Free Press.
The memo said that Quincy was in the process of retaining an immigration lawyer who had “advised that we immediately prepare a writ of habeas corpus to have at the ready” if Parsi were suddenly detained by immigration officials. Parsi and Quincy didn’t respond to my requests for comment.
Lumpe blamed at least some of the government’s scrutiny of Parsi on right-wing influencer Laura Loomer, whose online attacks target people she believes are disloyal to the president. In an April post on X, Loomer accused Parsi of being “a mouthpiece for the Iranian regime” who had used Quincy and NIAC “to push out pro-Iranian regime talking points.” In May, she wrote that Parsi’s “days in our country are numbered.”
An online petition started by an Iranian-born researcher and activist, Afshin Kamyabniya, claiming Parsi should be deported because he has aided Iran’s information warfare campaign, has gained over 81,000 signatures.
A State Department spokesman said he couldn’t discuss the immigration status of Parsi or any other U.S. green-card holder.
Since its inception in 2019, Quincy has advocated scaling back the U.S.’s military footprint around the world and ending what it describes as Washington’s “forever wars” in the Middle East. The think tank has also promoted a more accommodating approach toward traditional American adversaries like China and Russia. And it has aggressively pushed for the U.S. to minimize its military support for Israel.
Parsi said in a podcast last month that he launched Quincy with the ambitious mandate of “changing the grand strategy of the United States” to “focus its statecraft on diplomacy and military restraint.” Quincy’s strategy includes making inroads into both the left and right of American politics, and Parsi has been very successful at doing so.
In 2024, many Iran hawks and Parsi critics were stunned when J.D. Vance, then a U.S. senator from Ohio, delivered a major foreign policy address at a conference co-hosted by Quincy and The American Conservative. Parsi sat in the front row.
Contributors to Quincy’s online magazine, Responsible Statecraft, have served in national security positions in both Trump administrations. Parsi also is a regular presence in the conservative podcast ecosystem, appearing with Bannon, Judge Andrew Napolitano, and Darryl Cooper, who trivializes the Holocaust.
Quincy has attracted an eclectic mix of donors, from the conservative Charles Koch Foundation to the progressive Open Society Foundations to philanthropic stalwarts such as the Carnegie Corporation and Ford Foundation. Quincy chairman Stephen Heintz is also president and CEO of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a foundation that says it promotes social change.
Over the past three decades, few people in Washington have played a more central and public role in shaping views about Iran than Parsi. He started NIAC in 2002 as a voice for Iranian Americans, who he believed were underrepresented in political and policy circles. NIAC sought to protect Muslim communities in the U.S. from what the organization saw as the excesses of the George W. Bush administration’s war on terrorism after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Parsi and NIAC argued that Iran could emerge as an ally despite its history of anti-U.S. rhetoric and violence.
In 2009, Parsi and NIAC sued Iranian American journalist Hassan Daioleslam for defamation after Daioleslam claimed, in a series of articles, that they were trying to advance Iran’s interests and should register as foreign agents for Iran. The judge threw out the lawsuit, and documents that emerged during the discovery process added fuel to the whispers and suspicions about Parsi.
Emails showed that he had corresponded with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, who later became foreign minister. The two men discussed ways for the Iranian diplomat to meet with American lawmakers and to take part in U.S.-based policy conferences. Parsi also sought to amplify a secret diplomatic overture by Iran in 2003 known as the “Grand Bargain,” which some U.S. officials saw as specious or even a form of disinformation aimed at reducing pressure on Tehran.
The judge in the case ruled that the fact Parsi had “occasionally made statements reflecting a balanced, shared-blame approach is not inconsistent with the idea that he was first and foremost an advocate for the regime,” according to the ruling. “After all, any moderately intelligent agent for the Iranian regime would not want to be seen as unremittingly pro-regime, given the regime’s reputation in the United States.”
Yet Parsi’s influence kept growing. When President Barack Obama began his second term in 2012, he was fixated on securing an agreement with Iran’s theocrats to limit their nuclear capabilities. Parsi and NIAC emerged as important partners in a strategy to promote and sell an accord with a country most Americans knew for chanting “Death to America” for over 40 years.
Parsi visited the White House more than 30 times before the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal was reached in 2015, according to visitor logs. He publicly described himself as an “informal” adviser on the talks. Senior Obama administration officials appeared at NIAC policy conferences, and it became part of a constellation of think tanks and influencers that Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, called “an echo chamber” because they were willing to say “things that validated what we had given them to say.”
“The mission that NIAC has is so important, so that the voice and concerns of the Iranian American community, in all of its diversity, is a part of the civic discussion in this country,” Rhodes said at a NIAC event in 2016.
But what almost no one knew at the time was that Parsi’s Sweden-based brother, scholar Rouzbeh Parsi, was secretly helping to oversee another information operation aimed at publicly selling the nuclear deal—and this one was a partnership with Iran’s foreign ministry. I first reported about that influence operation for Semafor in 2023. According to a cache of Iranian foreign ministry emails, Rouzbeh Parsi was part of a small group of Iranian scholars in the U.S. and Europe who formed an organization called the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI) in 2014.
The emails showed that Iranian officials viewed the IEI as a vehicle to help Foreign Minister Javad Zarif’s team amplify Tehran’s positions on nuclear power and Middle East security as the negotiations intensified. IEI members later said that the organization was only an informal research group. But one Iranian diplomat described the IEI in an email almost as a public-relations agency used by Iran’s foreign ministry to track media appearances and publications produced by the experts.
“We were in constant contact and worked vigorously around the clock,” Iranian diplomat Saeed Khatibzadeh wrote to a colleague as the nuclear talks neared their climax. “Some friends performed as resourceful as a media outlet all by themselves.”
The email, forwarded to Zarif, included 10 Microsoft Word documents that compiled the output of key IEI members, including Rouzbeh Parsi and Reza Marashi, who was NIAC’s research director at the time. Marashi and Trita Parsi had just co-written an essay with the headline “Why Iran Won’t Capitulate.” Marashi didn’t respond to requests for comment.
An investigation last year by Rouzbeh Parsi’s former employer in Stockholm, the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI), concluded that he had been a principal creator of IEI. The investigation also found that he never told UI, the Swedish foreign ministry, or the University of Lund, where Rouzbeh Parsi was a lecturer, about the IEI’s secretive work to promote Tehran’s talking points during negotiations for the 2015 nuclear deal.
The report found that Rouzbeh Parsi had been “misleading” when he said in 2023 that the IEI was funded by the UK’s Foreign Office. According to UI, London provided no money to IEI in 2014 or 2015. It did receive some funding from a German foundation closely associated with the country’s Green Party and from public Swedish sources.
In May 2025, UI said that it had ended Rouzbeh Parsi’s employment. “The combination of a lack of transparency about the IEI’s network toward UI and a lack of openness to the outside world regarding contacts with representatives of the Iranian regime. . . do not appear to be compatible with UI’s interests and regulations,” the report said.
The report concluded that Rouzbeh Parsi wasn’t paid by Iran or under its control. He responded at the time that he had been “acquitted of the accusation of having participated in an influence campaign controlled by Iran.” He added that the UI investigation was “preceded by a witch hunt with a clear political character.” Rouzbeh Parsi didn’t respond to my requests for comment.
The revelations set off alarms in Congress and calls by Republicans for IEI’s members to be investigated. They specifically focused on Ariane Tabatabai, a founding IEI member appointed in 2022 by the Joe Biden administration to a senior and highly sensitive position in the Defense Department’s bureau of Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict. Last fall, Cotton, now chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, pressed the Pentagon and Federal Bureau of Investigation to block Tabatabai and other IEI members from being “in a position to influence U.S. policy decisions and access our nation’s most sensitive intelligence.”
In April, Tabatabai joined the Chicago Council on Global Affairs as its vice president of research, security, and defense. The organization’s president, Leslie Vinjamuri, told The Free Press in a statement that Tabatabai “is an American citizen who has served the United States both in and out of uniform with excellent evaluations. She has undergone security processes with several U.S. government agencies and departments, and all concluded she was fit to serve and to hold clearances, including under President Trump. Her clearance has not been revoked.”
I didn’t see Trita Parsi’s name anywhere in the Foreign Ministry emails as an IEI member. But Iranians in the diaspora who track the regime’s influence networks told me that it seemed inconceivable that he wasn’t aware of his brother’s leadership role in the organization.
“What we are seeing with Trita Parsi in Washington and Rouzbeh Parsi in Europe isn’t a coincidence,” said Lawdan Bazargan, an Iranian American human rights and political activist in California. “In my view, the Islamic Republic effectively positioned two brothers on two different continents to advance the same strategic agenda: weaken pressure on Tehran, normalize engagement with the regime, and rebrand policies that benefited the Islamic Republic as ‘anti-war’ activism.”
The U.S.-Iran war only intensified the feud between Parsi and critics of the Islamic Republic. He accused Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last monarch, and women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad, of complicity in the deaths of Iranians because they supported the war. Parsi wrote in March that they had “tricked Iranians into thinking this war would set them free.”
Even as Iran hawks such as Cotton and Cruz seem to be closing in on Parsi, the pundit has found common cause with isolationist, increasingly influential arms of MAGA and the Republican Party. Those ideological allies seem to include Vance and podcaster Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host. They support many of Parsi’s national security positions, particularly on ending the wars in Iran and Ukraine and reducing American support for Israel.
The kinship was on full display last month when Parsi appeared at a Quincy event at a Washington café with Joe Kent, who recently resigned as Trump’s National Counterterrorism Center director. Both men described the Iran war as a strategic disaster for the U.S., arguing that the president needs to reduce economic and military pressure on Tehran to stabilize the Middle East. They stressed that the U.S.’s alliance with Israel was an increasing liability.
“We actually have to start taking back some of the military support that we give to them,” Kent said of Israel while sitting next to Parsi. “We could have prevented the entire 12-day war [in June 2025] from happening, in my opinion, if we would have taken away enough of Israel’s air defense.”
Parsi’s triumphalist view of Iran’s performance in the ongoing war with the U.S. and Israel has certainly been noticed by the Islamic Republic. Photos showing banners bearing Parsi’s face and hanging on a Tehran overpass and lamppost were circulated on social media last month by anti-regime activists. The banners include this quote from Parsi: “Trump’s failed war has destroyed America’s ability to make military threats.”
Jay Solomon is the executive director of investigations at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University and a contributing writer at The Free Press
