Add The New York Post on Google Iran out of patience?
A defensive Mayor Zohran Mamdani tried to downplay his international affairs commissioner’s boneheaded attempted meeting with the anti-US Iranian ambassador — as he faced heat from aghast GOP lawmakers Friday.
Mamdani said he never knew about Commissioner Ana Maria Archila’s scheduled — and thwarted — confab this week with Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran’s permanent representative to the United Nations, until he received a press inquiry about it.
He repeatedly stressed the sitdown never took place and chalked it up to a scheduling snafu.
“The commissioner recognizes that this was made in error and we’re working on a new process in terms of new meeting requests,” he told reporters at an unrelated event. “Again, this was a request that came into the office, not one that originated from the office.”
The highly unusual would-be meeting between a Big Apple official and top diplomat from Iran — a nation hostile to the US even before the current war — caused President Trump’s State Department officials to intervene.
The city office already multiple layers of checks and balances in place to avoid such a glaring gaffe, so it appears Archila would have sidestepped proper protocols to set the meeting, according to insiders.
But it also wasn’t the first time Mamdani or someone in his administration tried to meet with a controversial foreign official.
The mayor himself planned a face-to-face with Colombia’s outgoing leftist president Gustavo Petro — a June meeting that was also kiboshed by the Trump administration.
After Archila’s Iranian misadventure was exposed Thursday, Republican City Council members sent her a scathing letter demanding answers over the meeting and the international affairs office’s seeming drift into foreign diplomacy.
The lawmakers’ Friday letter accused the international affairs commissioner of using her post to advance “a worldwide socialist agenda” and prioritizing relationships with like-minded foreign governments.
“It is dubious, at best, for a city office that has absolutely no authority to discuss or shape US foreign policy to engage in such a role,” the letter said.
“However, for it to conspire to meet with the representative of a dangerous, authoritarian, fascist regime that is the worldwide leader of state-sponsored terrorism, that has vowed ‘Death to America,’ and is currently engaged in a lethal military conflict with our country, is an astounding (breach) of protocol and public trust, and could be construed as a subversive act.”
The mayor’s international affairs office traditionally acted akin to a concierge service for the scores of diplomats in New York City — helping them get their children into schools, fulfill permits and other similar hosting tasks.
Sources familiar with the office noted any presidential administration would rightly get “anxious” if city officials met with diplomats or leaders from nations with which the US has a fraught relationship.
In the past, officials with the international affairs office would try to address such foreign dignitaries’ issues without a sit-down in order to avoid inadvertently stepping into a sensitive diplomatic situation, the source said.
Iranian officials in the UN reached out to set the ultimately scuttled meeting — which would have taken place in 2 United Nations Plaza — and not the other way around, according to the sources.
