February 24, 2026
Dave DeCamp
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Tuesday reaffirmed Iran’s long-standing position that it does not seek nuclear weapons and will never develop them. The comments come as Trump administration officials threaten war over claims Tehran may be pursuing a bomb, even as President Trump insists he already “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program.
Dave DeCamp
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Tuesday reaffirmed Iran’s long-standing position that it does not seek nuclear weapons and will never develop them. The comments come as Trump administration officials threaten war over claims Tehran may be pursuing a bomb, even as President Trump insists he already “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program.
Aragchi made the remarks in a
post on X where he referenced upcoming talks with the US in Geneva and said
Iran was ready for a deal with the US while also affirming Tehran’s right to
enrich uranium for civilian purposes.
“Our fundamental convictions are crystal clear: Iran will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon; neither will we Iranians ever forgo our right to harness the dividends of peaceful nuclear technology for our people,” Araghchi wrote on X.
“We have a historic opportunity to strike an unprecedented agreement that addresses mutual concerns and achieves mutual interests. A deal is within reach, but only if diplomacy is given priority,” he added.
Later in the day, Fox News host Brett Baier said that President Trump told him that Iran “desperately wants a deal” but claimed Tehran “just can’t say the sacred phrase ‘we won’t build nuclear weapons’” despite Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s long-standing fatwa against developing nuclear weapons. Trump reaffirmed his claim on Tuesday night when delivering his State of the Union.
Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, who is leading the negotiations, also made a similar claim in an interview that aired over the weekend. “Why, under this sort of pressure, with the amount of seapower, naval power, that we have over there, why they haven’t come to us and said, ‘we profess that we don’t want a [nuclear] weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do,’ yet it’s hard to get them to that point,” Witkoff said.
The US envoy also made the false claim that Iran could be a “week away” from having material to develop a nuclear bomb, even though there’s no sign Iran is able to enrich uranium at the moment, following the US strikes on its nuclear facilities in June 2025.
Other senior Trump officials, including Vice President JD Vance, have framed the potential attack on Iran as related to the prospect of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon. But President Trump continues to say he destroyed the Iranian nuclear program, and hasn’t provided a coherent reason for why he is preparing to launch a major war in the Middle East.
Aída Chávez
Democratic leadership and senior aides are working to blunt momentum for a vote on the Khanna-Massie Iran war powers resolution.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Democrats have been working behind the scenes to try to prevent a vote on Reps. Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie’s Iran war powers resolution – a measure that would require every member of Congress to go on the record about a potential U.S. war with Iran.
A top Democratic HFAC staffer, multiple sources with direct knowledge tell me, deliberately inflated projections of opposition to the bipartisan measure – warning of 20 to 40 Democratic defections – as part of a broader effort to dampen momentum and prevent the Iran war powers vote from advancing. Khanna and Massie had initially planned to force a vote on the resolution this week, but Democratic leadership is now saying they expect the vote to be delayed until next week or even later. The postponement comes as the Trump administration accelerates preparations for unauthorized military action, overseeing the largest U.S. military buildup in the region in years.
A senior Democratic congressional staffer told me it’s “pretty clear” Democratic leadership is working to delay “or potentially sideline” the vote on the Khanna-Massie war powers resolution. “If you’ve been around the Hill, this is a familiar playbook.”
“Leadership rarely comes out and says they oppose these votes outright, because they know the underlying issue is popular with the base,” said the staffer, who works on foreign policy. “Instead, you see process concerns, timing objections, and caucus-unity arguments used to slow things down or keep members off the record. We’ve seen the same approach on past war powers votes and foreign policy amendments that clash with the national security elite consensus.”
The internal effort to sabotage momentum for the Iran war powers resolution reflects a broader strategic calculation among Democratic elites. As a recent Drop Site report detailed, many top Democrats privately believe Iran will ultimately have to be confronted militarily. But they also understand that openly backing another regime change war in the Middle East would be politically toxic. Poll after poll show there is little to no appetite for war with Iran, including lukewarm support among conservatives. The preferred outcome of many AIPAC-aligned Senate Democrats, according to a senior foreign policy aide to Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, is that Trump acts unilaterally, weakening Iran while absorbing the domestic backlash ahead of the midterms.
The war powers vote threatens to disrupt that arrangement by forcing Democrats to declare, publicly and on the record, whether they support giving Trump unilateral authority to wage war.
Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the top Democrat in the House, critics argue, are not leading resistance to a potential war with Iran because they fundamentally agree with the aims of the Iran hawks working inside the Trump administration. In June 2025, ahead of the U.S. strikes on Iran, Schumer attacked Trump from the right, urging the administration to be “tough” on Iran and cautioning against making any “side deals” without Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approval.
Hill sources say Jeffries and other members of Democratic leadership are not actively whipping support for the Khanna-Massie resolution. While some committee leaders have issued statements invoking Congress’s constitutional war powers, most have declined to endorse the resolution itself, even as it is the only war powers measure up for a vote.
Unlike the run-up to the Iraq war, when the Bush administration orchestrated a sustained campaign to sell the public on invasion, the Trump administration has made little effort to construct a coherent case for war with Iran. They aren’t bothering to lie convincingly to the public. And top Democrats, mainstream media outlets, and liberal commentators have been conspicuously silent.
There has been no sustained public argument outlining a clear and immediate danger that Iran supposedly poses to the U.S. Trump has cited a shifting and incoherent mix of grievances – nuclear activity, missile capability, and regional proxy activity – without consolidating them into a comprehensive narrative like the one that preceded Iraq, even as the prospect of military action inches closer. After bombing Iran in June, Trump declared Iran’s nuclear facilities “totally obliterated.” Now, eight months later, Trump officials are claiming that Iran is “weeks away” from developing nuclear bomb-making material.
I asked Schumer’s office last week whether he supports Trump’s potential strikes, and whether escalation into a broader regional conflict is a risk he considers acceptable. His office did not respond to my request for comment. Days later, and only after the Drop Site report was published, Schumer’s office issued a minimal statement in support of congressional war powers.
So far, pro-Israel Democrats and AIPAC favorites Reps. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Jared Moskowitz of Florida are the only Democrats publicly opposing the Iran war powers resolution. Gottheimer joined Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., in arguing against the resolution last week – effectively opposing even a formal debate over a conflict that could spiral into a broader regional war.
“We respect and defend Congress’s constitutional role in matters of war,” they wrote in a joint statement. “Oversight and debate are absolutely vital. However, this resolution would restrict the flexibility needed to respond to real and evolving threats and risks signaling weakness at a dangerous moment.”
Votes to invoke the War Powers Resolution are historically rare on Capitol Hill – though they have increased in frequency in recent years – and party leadership in both chambers has sought to avoid them. Passed over Nixon’s veto, the War Powers Resolution of 1973 was designed to guarantee that decisions about war reflect congressional deliberation and, by extension, the will of the American people before a president pulls the trigger. Forcing members to take a recorded position on military action carries political risk and can expose internal divisions, particularly when the White House is pressing for escalation.
But there is currently scant evidence of the mass Democratic revolt against the resolution that the HFAC staffer predicted. (The HFAC staffer referred my questions to the committee’s communications team, which did not immediately respond to my request for comment.)
“We are thinking there will likely be fewer defections than that,” said a spokesperson for J Street, a pro-Israel group that opposes war with Iran. “What we are hearing is that more and more members are committing to support the War Powers resolution due to Trump’s inching toward war.”
“Leadership will always bluff to try to scare the sponsors from calling the vote,” an organizer at an advocacy group opposing Iran strikes told me. “In reality, Moskowitz and Gottheimer are likely to be quite lonely.”
“Democratic leadership is putting in about as much energy into stopping this war as they did into pressuring Biden to rejoin the JCPOA – which is to say, almost zero,” said the organizer, who works closely with Democratic offices. “It’s obvious they’re not going to fight to protect Iranian lives if that means helping Trump avoid a war that will crater his popularity.”
Even Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a staunch pro-Israel Democrat from Florida, has flipped on the issue. She supported Trump’s strikes on Iran in June but is now publicly against unauthorized war with Iran. “Make the case to the American people. Make the case to Congress,” Wasserman-Schultz said in an interview on MSNBC. “We have not seen anything about an imminent threat that would necessitate a significant strike.”
Republican Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio has voiced a similar concern from the right, warning that the U.S. doesn’t “need to participate in all the wars we’re invited to, regardless of who plans them for us.”
The recent Venezuela vote also offers a useful comparison. When lawmakers were asked to weigh in on another unauthorized military action just weeks ago, Democrats did not defect en masse. The Venezuela war powers resolution failed by a narrow margin in both the Senate and the House. In the Senate, Vice President JD Vance cast a tie-breaking vote to effectively kill the resolution.
Pentagon officials are privately warning that a war with Iran could mean significant casualties, munitions shortages, and a drawn-out regional conflict. Democratic leadership seems prepared to live with that – they’d just prefer not to sign their names to it.
Max Blumenthal and Wyatt Reed
The National Endowment for Democracy’s president, Damon Wilson, bragged to a House committee of his group’s aggressive efforts to spark unrest in Iran, including by smuggling Starlink terminals and fashioning anti-Iran narratives for the media.
Damon Wilson, the head of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), was interrupted by a member of Congress during a House oversight hearing on February 24 after revealing that his agency “began supporting the deployment [and] operation of about 200 Starlinks early on” amid the violence which swept through Iran last month.
Before he could finish the sentence, he was cut off by the ranking member of the House Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs, Rep. Lois Frankel, who told Wilson: “You know what, I’m going to interrupt you – we’d better not talk about it.”
Wilson’s comments had been prompted by a question from Frankel, who requested details of what appears to be a new and apparently secret initiative by the State Department to provide Starlink terminals to Iranians.
Wilson appeared to take credit for both the recent unrest and Iran and subsequent media framing of the chaos. “What we’re seeing today, the Endowment has been making investments over years that have ensured that there have been secure communications, including Starlinks… that allowed information to go both in and out of the country,” he stated.
According to the New York Times, the Elon Musk-produced internet systems had been smuggled into the country by a “ragtag network of activists, developers and engineers [who] pierced Iran’s digital barricades.” It is clear now that the NED was at least partly responsible for funding and coordinating that network.
With Starlink emerging as a key weapon in the information war waged against Iran, it’s unclear how anti-government actors have managed to smuggle the devices into the country. But a recent incident in which a senior Dutch diplomat was caught trying to sneak multiple Starlink units and satellite phones through security at Iran’s Imam Khomeini Airport gives a hint.
The National Endowment for Democracy was founded in 1982 under the auspices of then-CIA Director William Casey to topple socialist and independent governments through the direct sponsorship of NGO’s, media organizations and political parties. “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” NED co-founder Allen Weinstein said of the Endowment’s work in 1991.
Despite its mission of promoting transparency and “fundamental freedoms” abroad, the NED is now a dark money group which conceals the names of its local partners under a “duty of care” policy announced in 2025. During his congressional testimony this February, Wilson insisted the policy was necessary for the security of grantees on the ground.
The NED’s work to smuggle Starlink terminals into Iran is therefore a covert operation aimed at promoting unrest. And according to Wilson, it is now a key part of the Endowment’s most aggressive initiative.
Iran “has been a huge priority for the Endowment. Iran has been, since I arrived at the Endowment, our fastest-growing program,” Wilson told Frankel.
“It’s now one of our largest programs globally, that involves both direct partners – Iranian groups – as well as our core institutes.”
Wilson said his organization was instrumental in bringing about the 2002 “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, which saw Iranians initially mobilize against the Islamic Republic’s mandatory hijab law before the protests deteriorated into violent riots.
“If you think about the impact of our work in Iran, the reason the Women, Life, Freedom movement began with a simple headscarf – that story of Mahsa Amini could have been lost as a regional story in Iran. But NED partners helped cover that story, get it out to the world, and get it back into Iran,” Wilson said, referring to the Iranian Kurdish woman who died in police custody from an apparent medical condition after being detained for violating the mandatory hijab law.
Violent regime change riots erupted again this January 8 and 9 across Iran, resulting in the burning of police stations, hundreds of mosques and worship sites, government buildings, marketplaces and lethal mob assaults on unarmed guards as well as police officers. The violence only stopped when Iranian security services imposed an internet blackout and neutralized thousands of Starlink terminals.
The Iranian government has provided the names and identification numbers of over 3000 citizens who were killed during the two days of rioting. But as The Grayzone reported, the NED-funded NGO, Human Rights Activists in Iran, initially claimed the death toll was over twice as high.
Now, as mainstream outlets like The Guardian cite dubious monarchist sources to exaggerate the death toll even further, the NED’s Wilson has revealed that his organization is working with “human rights networks” to “provide international media and other credible sources of what’s happened.”
These US-funded groups were involved in “documenting 17,000 deaths,” Wilson claimed, adding that “upwards, potentially of 30,000, remain under review by our partners right now.” As The Grayzone reported, the claim that Iran killed 30,000 people in just two nights originated with an opposition activist closely tied to the self-styled ‘crown prince’ Reza Pahlavi, heir to Iran’s ousted yet still CIA-tied monarchy.
Asked by Frankel whether he had any recommendations about “hard power” options for the US against Iran, Wilson insisted that his role was not to provide policy advice. He was much more comfortable boasting about NED’s role in shaping anti-Iran media narratives, such as the one blaming the country’s leadership for persistent drought conditions:
“Part of what we see manifesting is a response that our partners have helped tell the Iranian people the story, that the regime has squandered their own resources on supporting proxies throughout the Middle East, to the point where they cannot manage their own water supplies for Tehran. And these stories have not just emerged, they are ones that have been covered, documented, and shared with the Iranian people consistently through our work.”
Elsewhere in his testimony, Wilson appeared to take credit for the election of a right-wing government in Bolivia – and that his NED did so to ensure US control over the country’s mineral wealth: “In Bolivia,” he declared, “our partners prevented lithium from falling under Moscow’s control.”
Wilson also revealed that NED is funding and training media in Nicaragua with an eye on undermining the country’s socialist-oriented Sandinista government. “We have an incredible suite of Nicaraguan journalists with coverage networks inside the country,” he boasted.
Rep. Frankel closed the session by suggesting that the US government was mirroring many of the repressive tactics the NED condemned abroad: “Political enemies being imprisoned by autocratic leaders. Masked men going into homes and terrorizing people. Certainly can understand why so many people are fleeing their countries. Unfortunately, it sounds very sad, because it sounds like the story that’s going on here.”
“Our fundamental convictions are crystal clear: Iran will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon; neither will we Iranians ever forgo our right to harness the dividends of peaceful nuclear technology for our people,” Araghchi wrote on X.
“We have a historic opportunity to strike an unprecedented agreement that addresses mutual concerns and achieves mutual interests. A deal is within reach, but only if diplomacy is given priority,” he added.
Later in the day, Fox News host Brett Baier said that President Trump told him that Iran “desperately wants a deal” but claimed Tehran “just can’t say the sacred phrase ‘we won’t build nuclear weapons’” despite Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s long-standing fatwa against developing nuclear weapons. Trump reaffirmed his claim on Tuesday night when delivering his State of the Union.
Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, who is leading the negotiations, also made a similar claim in an interview that aired over the weekend. “Why, under this sort of pressure, with the amount of seapower, naval power, that we have over there, why they haven’t come to us and said, ‘we profess that we don’t want a [nuclear] weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do,’ yet it’s hard to get them to that point,” Witkoff said.
The US envoy also made the false claim that Iran could be a “week away” from having material to develop a nuclear bomb, even though there’s no sign Iran is able to enrich uranium at the moment, following the US strikes on its nuclear facilities in June 2025.
Other senior Trump officials, including Vice President JD Vance, have framed the potential attack on Iran as related to the prospect of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon. But President Trump continues to say he destroyed the Iranian nuclear program, and hasn’t provided a coherent reason for why he is preparing to launch a major war in the Middle East.
Aída Chávez
Democratic leadership and senior aides are working to blunt momentum for a vote on the Khanna-Massie Iran war powers resolution.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Democrats have been working behind the scenes to try to prevent a vote on Reps. Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie’s Iran war powers resolution – a measure that would require every member of Congress to go on the record about a potential U.S. war with Iran.
A top Democratic HFAC staffer, multiple sources with direct knowledge tell me, deliberately inflated projections of opposition to the bipartisan measure – warning of 20 to 40 Democratic defections – as part of a broader effort to dampen momentum and prevent the Iran war powers vote from advancing. Khanna and Massie had initially planned to force a vote on the resolution this week, but Democratic leadership is now saying they expect the vote to be delayed until next week or even later. The postponement comes as the Trump administration accelerates preparations for unauthorized military action, overseeing the largest U.S. military buildup in the region in years.
A senior Democratic congressional staffer told me it’s “pretty clear” Democratic leadership is working to delay “or potentially sideline” the vote on the Khanna-Massie war powers resolution. “If you’ve been around the Hill, this is a familiar playbook.”
“Leadership rarely comes out and says they oppose these votes outright, because they know the underlying issue is popular with the base,” said the staffer, who works on foreign policy. “Instead, you see process concerns, timing objections, and caucus-unity arguments used to slow things down or keep members off the record. We’ve seen the same approach on past war powers votes and foreign policy amendments that clash with the national security elite consensus.”
The internal effort to sabotage momentum for the Iran war powers resolution reflects a broader strategic calculation among Democratic elites. As a recent Drop Site report detailed, many top Democrats privately believe Iran will ultimately have to be confronted militarily. But they also understand that openly backing another regime change war in the Middle East would be politically toxic. Poll after poll show there is little to no appetite for war with Iran, including lukewarm support among conservatives. The preferred outcome of many AIPAC-aligned Senate Democrats, according to a senior foreign policy aide to Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, is that Trump acts unilaterally, weakening Iran while absorbing the domestic backlash ahead of the midterms.
The war powers vote threatens to disrupt that arrangement by forcing Democrats to declare, publicly and on the record, whether they support giving Trump unilateral authority to wage war.
Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the top Democrat in the House, critics argue, are not leading resistance to a potential war with Iran because they fundamentally agree with the aims of the Iran hawks working inside the Trump administration. In June 2025, ahead of the U.S. strikes on Iran, Schumer attacked Trump from the right, urging the administration to be “tough” on Iran and cautioning against making any “side deals” without Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approval.
Hill sources say Jeffries and other members of Democratic leadership are not actively whipping support for the Khanna-Massie resolution. While some committee leaders have issued statements invoking Congress’s constitutional war powers, most have declined to endorse the resolution itself, even as it is the only war powers measure up for a vote.
Unlike the run-up to the Iraq war, when the Bush administration orchestrated a sustained campaign to sell the public on invasion, the Trump administration has made little effort to construct a coherent case for war with Iran. They aren’t bothering to lie convincingly to the public. And top Democrats, mainstream media outlets, and liberal commentators have been conspicuously silent.
There has been no sustained public argument outlining a clear and immediate danger that Iran supposedly poses to the U.S. Trump has cited a shifting and incoherent mix of grievances – nuclear activity, missile capability, and regional proxy activity – without consolidating them into a comprehensive narrative like the one that preceded Iraq, even as the prospect of military action inches closer. After bombing Iran in June, Trump declared Iran’s nuclear facilities “totally obliterated.” Now, eight months later, Trump officials are claiming that Iran is “weeks away” from developing nuclear bomb-making material.
I asked Schumer’s office last week whether he supports Trump’s potential strikes, and whether escalation into a broader regional conflict is a risk he considers acceptable. His office did not respond to my request for comment. Days later, and only after the Drop Site report was published, Schumer’s office issued a minimal statement in support of congressional war powers.
So far, pro-Israel Democrats and AIPAC favorites Reps. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Jared Moskowitz of Florida are the only Democrats publicly opposing the Iran war powers resolution. Gottheimer joined Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., in arguing against the resolution last week – effectively opposing even a formal debate over a conflict that could spiral into a broader regional war.
“We respect and defend Congress’s constitutional role in matters of war,” they wrote in a joint statement. “Oversight and debate are absolutely vital. However, this resolution would restrict the flexibility needed to respond to real and evolving threats and risks signaling weakness at a dangerous moment.”
Votes to invoke the War Powers Resolution are historically rare on Capitol Hill – though they have increased in frequency in recent years – and party leadership in both chambers has sought to avoid them. Passed over Nixon’s veto, the War Powers Resolution of 1973 was designed to guarantee that decisions about war reflect congressional deliberation and, by extension, the will of the American people before a president pulls the trigger. Forcing members to take a recorded position on military action carries political risk and can expose internal divisions, particularly when the White House is pressing for escalation.
But there is currently scant evidence of the mass Democratic revolt against the resolution that the HFAC staffer predicted. (The HFAC staffer referred my questions to the committee’s communications team, which did not immediately respond to my request for comment.)
“We are thinking there will likely be fewer defections than that,” said a spokesperson for J Street, a pro-Israel group that opposes war with Iran. “What we are hearing is that more and more members are committing to support the War Powers resolution due to Trump’s inching toward war.”
“Leadership will always bluff to try to scare the sponsors from calling the vote,” an organizer at an advocacy group opposing Iran strikes told me. “In reality, Moskowitz and Gottheimer are likely to be quite lonely.”
“Democratic leadership is putting in about as much energy into stopping this war as they did into pressuring Biden to rejoin the JCPOA – which is to say, almost zero,” said the organizer, who works closely with Democratic offices. “It’s obvious they’re not going to fight to protect Iranian lives if that means helping Trump avoid a war that will crater his popularity.”
Even Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a staunch pro-Israel Democrat from Florida, has flipped on the issue. She supported Trump’s strikes on Iran in June but is now publicly against unauthorized war with Iran. “Make the case to the American people. Make the case to Congress,” Wasserman-Schultz said in an interview on MSNBC. “We have not seen anything about an imminent threat that would necessitate a significant strike.”
Republican Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio has voiced a similar concern from the right, warning that the U.S. doesn’t “need to participate in all the wars we’re invited to, regardless of who plans them for us.”
The recent Venezuela vote also offers a useful comparison. When lawmakers were asked to weigh in on another unauthorized military action just weeks ago, Democrats did not defect en masse. The Venezuela war powers resolution failed by a narrow margin in both the Senate and the House. In the Senate, Vice President JD Vance cast a tie-breaking vote to effectively kill the resolution.
Pentagon officials are privately warning that a war with Iran could mean significant casualties, munitions shortages, and a drawn-out regional conflict. Democratic leadership seems prepared to live with that – they’d just prefer not to sign their names to it.
Max Blumenthal and Wyatt Reed
The National Endowment for Democracy’s president, Damon Wilson, bragged to a House committee of his group’s aggressive efforts to spark unrest in Iran, including by smuggling Starlink terminals and fashioning anti-Iran narratives for the media.
Damon Wilson, the head of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), was interrupted by a member of Congress during a House oversight hearing on February 24 after revealing that his agency “began supporting the deployment [and] operation of about 200 Starlinks early on” amid the violence which swept through Iran last month.
Before he could finish the sentence, he was cut off by the ranking member of the House Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs, Rep. Lois Frankel, who told Wilson: “You know what, I’m going to interrupt you – we’d better not talk about it.”
Wilson’s comments had been prompted by a question from Frankel, who requested details of what appears to be a new and apparently secret initiative by the State Department to provide Starlink terminals to Iranians.
Wilson appeared to take credit for both the recent unrest and Iran and subsequent media framing of the chaos. “What we’re seeing today, the Endowment has been making investments over years that have ensured that there have been secure communications, including Starlinks… that allowed information to go both in and out of the country,” he stated.
According to the New York Times, the Elon Musk-produced internet systems had been smuggled into the country by a “ragtag network of activists, developers and engineers [who] pierced Iran’s digital barricades.” It is clear now that the NED was at least partly responsible for funding and coordinating that network.
With Starlink emerging as a key weapon in the information war waged against Iran, it’s unclear how anti-government actors have managed to smuggle the devices into the country. But a recent incident in which a senior Dutch diplomat was caught trying to sneak multiple Starlink units and satellite phones through security at Iran’s Imam Khomeini Airport gives a hint.
The National Endowment for Democracy was founded in 1982 under the auspices of then-CIA Director William Casey to topple socialist and independent governments through the direct sponsorship of NGO’s, media organizations and political parties. “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” NED co-founder Allen Weinstein said of the Endowment’s work in 1991.
Despite its mission of promoting transparency and “fundamental freedoms” abroad, the NED is now a dark money group which conceals the names of its local partners under a “duty of care” policy announced in 2025. During his congressional testimony this February, Wilson insisted the policy was necessary for the security of grantees on the ground.
The NED’s work to smuggle Starlink terminals into Iran is therefore a covert operation aimed at promoting unrest. And according to Wilson, it is now a key part of the Endowment’s most aggressive initiative.
Iran “has been a huge priority for the Endowment. Iran has been, since I arrived at the Endowment, our fastest-growing program,” Wilson told Frankel.
“It’s now one of our largest programs globally, that involves both direct partners – Iranian groups – as well as our core institutes.”
Wilson said his organization was instrumental in bringing about the 2002 “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, which saw Iranians initially mobilize against the Islamic Republic’s mandatory hijab law before the protests deteriorated into violent riots.
“If you think about the impact of our work in Iran, the reason the Women, Life, Freedom movement began with a simple headscarf – that story of Mahsa Amini could have been lost as a regional story in Iran. But NED partners helped cover that story, get it out to the world, and get it back into Iran,” Wilson said, referring to the Iranian Kurdish woman who died in police custody from an apparent medical condition after being detained for violating the mandatory hijab law.
Violent regime change riots erupted again this January 8 and 9 across Iran, resulting in the burning of police stations, hundreds of mosques and worship sites, government buildings, marketplaces and lethal mob assaults on unarmed guards as well as police officers. The violence only stopped when Iranian security services imposed an internet blackout and neutralized thousands of Starlink terminals.
The Iranian government has provided the names and identification numbers of over 3000 citizens who were killed during the two days of rioting. But as The Grayzone reported, the NED-funded NGO, Human Rights Activists in Iran, initially claimed the death toll was over twice as high.
Now, as mainstream outlets like The Guardian cite dubious monarchist sources to exaggerate the death toll even further, the NED’s Wilson has revealed that his organization is working with “human rights networks” to “provide international media and other credible sources of what’s happened.”
These US-funded groups were involved in “documenting 17,000 deaths,” Wilson claimed, adding that “upwards, potentially of 30,000, remain under review by our partners right now.” As The Grayzone reported, the claim that Iran killed 30,000 people in just two nights originated with an opposition activist closely tied to the self-styled ‘crown prince’ Reza Pahlavi, heir to Iran’s ousted yet still CIA-tied monarchy.
Asked by Frankel whether he had any recommendations about “hard power” options for the US against Iran, Wilson insisted that his role was not to provide policy advice. He was much more comfortable boasting about NED’s role in shaping anti-Iran media narratives, such as the one blaming the country’s leadership for persistent drought conditions:
“Part of what we see manifesting is a response that our partners have helped tell the Iranian people the story, that the regime has squandered their own resources on supporting proxies throughout the Middle East, to the point where they cannot manage their own water supplies for Tehran. And these stories have not just emerged, they are ones that have been covered, documented, and shared with the Iranian people consistently through our work.”
Elsewhere in his testimony, Wilson appeared to take credit for the election of a right-wing government in Bolivia – and that his NED did so to ensure US control over the country’s mineral wealth: “In Bolivia,” he declared, “our partners prevented lithium from falling under Moscow’s control.”
Wilson also revealed that NED is funding and training media in Nicaragua with an eye on undermining the country’s socialist-oriented Sandinista government. “We have an incredible suite of Nicaraguan journalists with coverage networks inside the country,” he boasted.
Rep. Frankel closed the session by suggesting that the US government was mirroring many of the repressive tactics the NED condemned abroad: “Political enemies being imprisoned by autocratic leaders. Masked men going into homes and terrorizing people. Certainly can understand why so many people are fleeing their countries. Unfortunately, it sounds very sad, because it sounds like the story that’s going on here.”
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