Robert Spencer has a look at one of John Kerry’s supporters—a shill for the mullahs of Iran who is trying to silence the Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran with a $10 million lawsuit: Kerry’s Iranian Connection Fights Democracy.

Frivolous lawsuits have long been used as weapons of the powerful against the weak; a particularly egregious example is now playing out in Texas, courtesy of one of John Kerry’s most controversial supporters: the Iranian Hassan Nemazee. Nemazee is pursuing a ten-million-dollar damage claim against the Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran (SMCCDI) and its coordinator, Aryo B. Pirouznia. A Nemazee victory in this suit would almost certainly muzzle or destroy altogether the SMCCDI, one of the most energetic and courageous opponents of Iran’s entrenched but uneasy mullahocracy. But now that Nemazee’s lawsuit has been filed, it has become increasingly clear that it could embarrass the entire Democratic Party — and severely damage the already flagging candidacy of John Kerry.

Nemazee is an influential figure with many friends in high places in groups such as the American-Iranian Council (AIC), the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), and the Iranian-American Bar Association (IABA). Nemazee’s name is also well known in Democratic Party circles. He was a prominent contributor to Bob Torricelli’s New Jersey Senate campaign. The multimillionaire entrepreneur also contributed $50,000 to his friend Al Gore’s Recount Fund (and $250,000 to the Gore campaign), $60,000 to Bill Clinton’s legal defense fund, and over $150,000 to the Democratic National Committee. Clinton attempted to reward him by naming him U.S. Ambassador to Argentina — but the Senate declined to confirm him after Forbes magazine published, in May 1999, an extremely damaging expose of his shady financial dealings.

Undaunted, Nemazee continued efforts to establish fruitful contacts between Iranian groups advocating normalization of relations with Iran and high-level members of the Democratic Party. He joined the Board of Directors of the AIC, an organization whose president, Hooshang Amirahmadi, is identified on the SMCCDI website as a “well known lobbyist for the Iranian Mullahocracy.” Nemazee was involved in a March 2002 fundraiser for Senate Foreign Affairs Committee heavyweight Joe Biden (D-DE). This event was hosted by Sadegh Namazikhah, another AIC member whom Aryo Pirouznia charges with trying to improve public perception of “one of the most despotic regimes in the world.”

Three months later it was Kerry’s turn: Nemazee invited the future Democratic standard bearer to speak at an AIC dinner. Nemazee himself also spoke, declaring that the AIC “does not attempt to explain or rationalize the position of the government of Iran, nor does it attempt to do so for the government of the United States. Its mission is to educate both sides and to attempt to establish the basis and the vehicle for a dialogue which will ultimately lead to a resumption of relations.” If Kerry registered any protest against this assertion that the United States should normalize relations with one of the world’s bloodiest dictatorships, it was not recorded. Nemazee, according to Iran experts Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi and Elio Bonazzi, now seems to be denying that he ever made this speech at all — although it is still posted on the AIC’s website.