WASHINGTON (Dispatches) -- The United States has sanctioned four Iranians over accusations of planning to kidnap a blogger who formerly worked for reformist publications in Iran and is now propagating against the Islamic Republic from New York.
In a statement released on Friday, the U.S. Treasury Department said that its Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) had blacklisted Alireza Shahvaroghi Farahani, Mahmoud Khazein, Kiya Sadeghi and Omid Noori.
The sanctions block all property of the four Iranians in the United States or in U.S. control, and prohibit any transactions between them and American citizens, according to the statement. Other non-Americans who conduct certain transactions with the four could also be subjected to U.S. sanctions.
Speaking on Saturday, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said, “Unfortunately, the current U.S. officials are pursuing the failed path of the previous administration.”
“The supporters and merchants of sanctions in the United States have found their sanctions toolbox empty due to Iran’s maximum resistance, and this time, by resorting to Hollywood scenarios, they are trying to keep alive their life derived from the sanctions environment,” he said.
“Washington should know that it has no choice but to abandon its addiction to sanctions and use respectful language and conduct with regard to Tehran.”
The U.S. Treasury statement did not name the so-called journalist, but it apparently meant Brooklyn, New York-based Masih Alinejad who is on the U.S. government pay.
Back in July, the U.S. Justice Department accused the four Iranians of planning to seize Alinejad from her $1.4 million mansion bought by the CIA and smuggle her to Iran.
Khatibzadeh categorically dismissed the U.S. allegations at the time. “This new claim by the U.S. government … is so baseless and ridiculous that it is not really worth answering,” he said.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken alleged in a statement on Friday that Washington was aware of “ongoing Iranian interest in targeting other American citizens, including current and former U.S. officials.”
The sanctions come amid a pause in Vienna talks between Iran and the P4+1 group of Britain, France, Russia, and China plus Germany on a potential revival of the 2015 nuclear deal, formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Former U.S. president Donald Trump left the JCPOA in May 2018 and reimposed the anti-Iran sanctions that the deal had lifted. He also placed additional sanctions on Iran under other pretexts not related to the nuclear case as part of the “maximum pressure” campaign.
Following a year of strategic patience, Iran resorted to its legal rights stipulated in Article 26 of the JCPOA, which grants a party the right to suspend its contractual commitments in case of non-compliance by other signatories, and let go of some of the restrictions imposed on its nuclear energy program.
The Biden administration has said it wants rejoin the deal, but it has done nothing in practice to bring the U.S. back to compliance with the agreement, including a verifiable removal of the sanctions.
On Saturday, the Tehran Times said the Biden administration is busy working with a number of Iran hawks in Washington to set out a plan to destroy the Vienna talks.
Citing documents it has seen, the paper said U.S. Special Envoy for Iran Rob Malley has been in touch with a vague, secret team of former Trump officials and Iran experts at conservative think tanks.
“The hush-hush team, known among its members as ‘Group on Iran Policy’, includes Trump’s Iran envoy Eliot Abrams, former diplomat and Distinguished Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy Deniss Ross, and managing director at the Washington Institute Michael Singh,” the report said.
“The group’s existence and meetings as well as discussions were meant to be secret and off the record, even though many other Iran hawks such as Ray Takeyh, Hasib J. Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, were already in the know about the formation of the group.”
The report said the group is the latest effort by the Biden administration to build up a bipartisan policy on Iran in a seemingly polarized political environment. Malley, it said, was seeking help from opponents of the JCPOA and staging propaganda operations against Tehran in a multi-pronged strategy devised equally by Republicans and Democrats.
“When it comes to Iran, the documents show, there is a division of labor; Republicans play the role of a bad cop while Democrats assume the role of a good cop. This begs the question: will the next round of the Vienna talks succeed in bridging the gaps between Iran and the U.S. on how to revive the JCPOA?” it asked.
“With Malley collaborating with the killers of the JCPOA, especially those who believe that he is often wrong on everything, one should be careful not to predict any breakthrough during the next round. In fact, there are already indications that the seventh round could be overshadowed by machinations of the scheming group,” the report added.
On Saturday, a senior Iranian lawmaker said any negotiation that

does not guarantee and secure the country’s interests is not worth engaging in.
“It is self-evident that Iran’s interests must be guaranteed in any negotiation,” Mahmoud Abbaszadeh-Meshkini told ICANA. “Any negotiation that does not guarantee and secure Iran’s interests cannot be attended” by Tehran, he added.
Abbaszadeh-Meshkini also said while Trump’s anti-Iran moves made him the “bad cop”, the European parties to the deal played a “more dangerous role”.
Malley said Friday that the U.S. had not received any indication that Iran’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, was prepared to commit to the seventh round of the talks.
“We can’t wait forever as Iran continues its nuclear advances because at some point their advances will be such as to make a return to the JCPOA much less valuable to the U.S. than it would otherwise be,” he told Bloomberg Television.
“But let’s not drag this on for too long because [at] some point, we’ll have to reach a different conclusion,” he said.
The top U.S. diplomat also repeated Washington’s insistence on a mutual return to compliance with the JCPOA without providing Tehran with a guarantee that it would not leave the deal again.
Reza Nasri, an international lawyer and foreign policy analyst, hit out at Malley.
“It’s not exactly as if both parties withdrew and must now take similar measures to come back to compliance,” he tweeted. “Iran and the U.S. neither enjoy the same weight of credibility, nor are they on the same moral footing.”
Nasri explained that the U.S. unjustifiably withdrew from the JCPOA in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 2231, escalated tensions and inflicted billions of dollars in damage to Iran amid a deadly pandemic.
Iran, he said, merely reacted to the U.S. withdrawal by beginning to reduce its nuclear commitments after a year, in total compliance with the provisions of the JCPOA.
Last December, Iranian lawmakers passed a law requiring the government to further scale back the country’s nuclear commitments in order to compel the U.S. to remove its sanctions and push other signatories to honor their commitments.
Referring to that law, Abbaszadeh-Meshkini said the Iranian parliament has chartered out the way forward.
The top lawmaker said the law, dubbed the Strategic Action Plan to Counter Sanctions, aims to safeguard the country’s national interests and is legally binding regardless of which administration is in power.
The new Iranian administration has said while it would never leave a “logical negotiating table”, it would not engage in talks just for the sake of talks either.