Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett claim they aren’t influence peddlers, but their emails suggest otherwise.

“We don’t know of a single ‘Western scholar’ or ‘policy wonk’ … who thinks that access to the Iranian regime is going to make them powerful, rich, or both,” Flynt Leverett and his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett, recently wrote on their website, raceforiran.com. The two Iran lobbyists were responding to my profile of them in Tablet Magazine two weeks ago, in which I wrote that contacts in a closed society have real value for policy types. “[A]ccess to the regime is a form of currency that can make you powerful, or rich, or both,” I wrote.

In Leveretts’ response to my article, they also claimed to have been quite offended when I suggested while interviewing them that their prospective trip to Iran “was facilitated via Muhammad Marandi on behalf of the IRGC,” or the Revolutionary Guards Corps. They charge that this information was made up, either by my sources or by me.