If you say it out loud, it seems too preposterous to be true. Four high-profile former government officials are getting paid by an Iranian dissident group that until 2012 was an officially designated terrorist organization to publicly oppose the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts with Iran.<\/p>\n
BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray<\/a> attended a briefing\u00a0in the Dirksen Senate office building on Capitol Hill sponsored by “an Iranian exile group related to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK).” The former government officials speaking out on behalf of this group against diplomacy with Iran included “former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, former Ambassador to Morocco Marc Ginsberg, General James L. Jones, and and former US Special Envoy for Nuclear Nonproliferation Robert Joseph.”<\/p>\n Robert Joseph described the diplomacy as “appeasement” and urged additional sanctions, which Obama has promised to veto, to stop “Iran\u2019s nuclear quest.”<\/p>\n Howard Dean refused to answer questions as to whether he was still getting boatloads of money from MEK groups and even went so far as to say that U.S.-Iran negotiations should not go forward until the Obama administration agrees to grant some kind of asylum to the 3,000 MEK activists sheltered by the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein that are now living in a U.S. military base called Camp Liberty.<\/p>\n \u201cWe ought to sign no agreement until those 3000 people are safe,\u201d Dean said.<\/p>\n Rewind to 2003.\u00a0George W. Bush\u00a0included Saddam Hussein\u2019s support for terrorists like MEK<\/a>\u00a0in his propaganda justifying the invasion of Iraq. \u201cIraq shelters terrorist groups including the Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization,\u201d reads a\u00a0document<\/a>\u00a0in the archives of the White House\u2019s website, \u201cwhich has used terrorist violence against Iran and in the 1970s was responsible for killing several US military personnel and US civilians.\u201d<\/p>\n As recently as 2007, a\u00a0State Department report<\/a>\u00a0warned that the MEK, retains \u201cthe capacity and will\u201d to attack \u201cEurope, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, and beyond.\u201d<\/p>\n Many experts, including current senior U.S. officials, believe that the MEK, backed by Israel, is the group responsible for assassinating Iran’s civilian nuclear scientists<\/a> in what are clear-cut terrorist acts.<\/p>\n