Pro-regime change journalist Shane Bauer files lawsuit seeking $10 million seized from Iran
Despite their professed opposition to US sanctions, Bauer and his fellow hikers-turned-cellmates stand to benefit handsomely from public assets plundered from Iran by the US government.
This investigation was co-authored with Max Blumenthal in The Grayzone. Click here to read the full article.
Over a decade since he rose to prominence as a protagonist in an international drama of espionage and imprisonment, American journalist Shane Bauer and his family filed suit against Iran’s government in a Washington DC-based US District Court, seeking compensation for $10 million in damages resulting from his two year detention in Tehran.
Bauer’s ex-wife Sarah Shourd and their friend, Joshua Fattal, filed simultaneous lawsuits, seeking $10,000 and $10 million respectively.
The trio’s cases were filed in a Washington DC federal court with Judge Richard J. Leon – the same justice who ordered the Iranian government to pay the Washington Post’s Jason Rezaian $180 million in damages for his 18-month detention in the country.
In 2011, an Iranian court sentenced Bauer and Fattal to a total of eight years in prison each after they were convicted of illegally crossing the country’s border and spying for the United States. The two each served a total of two years, while Shourd was granted a compassionate release from Iranian prison after 13 months of detention.
Before his imprisonment, Bauer trekked throughout Africa and the Middle East while working as an English teacher and roaming reporter, racking up an impressive collection of passport stamps. Following his 2011 release, he established himself as a journalist specializing in undercover investigations, working a stint as a senior reporter for Mother Jones magazine in between various freelance gigs.
Bauer simultaneously emerged as a prolific apologist for US-backed regime change operations from Syria to Nicaragua, while justifying the US assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. A relentless antagonist of anti-interventionist public figures, he has pushed for big tech platforms to censor media personalities that challenged Washington’s regime change agenda.
Bauer has even promoted a failed legal action against The Grayzone by a fellow journalist who had received a large sum of assets seized by the US government from Iran.
In 2018, Bauer’s book of undercover reporting, “American Prison,” which saw him take a job as a prison guard to gain inside access to a private prison, wound up on former President Barack Obama’s “Favorite Books of 2018.”
By the following year, as Bauer’s journalistic output declined, his attacks on anti-war media figures only escalated. Today, many of his most malicious tweets have been scrubbed, he is no longer employed by Mother Jones, and he says he is “working on a book about Americans in the Syrian war.” If Bauer scores a lucrative payout in US federal court, however, he may never need to worry about a freelance fee again.
And if successful, he and his former cellmates will ultimately be paid out with Iranian government assets seized by the United States through its international sanctions regime. In other words, the trio plans to benefit from looted public funds which Tehran could have otherwise used to purchase medicine, food, or fund social programs for its people.
Studies have found that the “Iranian economy and households are affected enormously” by sanctions targeting the country’s oil exports. In one particularly egregious instance of theft, the US government seized an Iranian oil tanker in 2021 and hauled it to Texas, where it sold the stolen crude for $110 million.
Before launching their lawsuits, Bauer and his ex-wife, Shourd, posed as staunch opponents of US sanctions against Ian and other nations. In 2016, for example, Bauer characterized Hillary Clinton’s call for Iran sanctions as “totally irresponsible.” Shourd, for her part, condemned sanctions against Iran for “hitting the poorest of Iranians the hardest.”
Bauer’s sudden bid for millions of dollars seized from the Iranian people by the US government raises new questions about a character whose journalistic career was shrouded in suspicion.
Long before his arrest in Iran, Bauer’s moves throughout Africa and the Middle East tracked closely with US foreign policy initiatives, and were sponsored by a US Department of Defense fellowship for several years.
To top it off, the lawyer Bauer enlisted to secure millions from Iran’s government counts one of Washington’s most infamous spies among her previous clients.