This is not a coincidence. This is a worldview.

City Journal broke the story: Commissioner Ana María Archila, Mamdani’s top official for international affairs, had a meeting scheduled with Iran’s UN Ambassador Amir-Saeid Iravani on July 7th at 11 a.m. — two other senior Mamdani officials were also on the calendar invite. The State Department was not informed. The meeting was only canceled after federal officials caught wind of it, sat the Mamdani administration down, and explained in terms apparently requiring elaboration that secretly scheduling meetings with the representative of a hostile foreign government is not acceptable conduct for a city official.

Archila was ‘reprimanded.’ The meeting was canceled. And Mamdani’s office is now claiming he didn’t know about it.

That’s the most charitable interpretation available, and it still isn’t particularly reassuring. Either the mayor of New York City has zero control over what his own senior officials are doing with Iran’s UN ambassador — or he knew about it and is lying. Neither option inspires confidence in a man who already claimed to have been “briefed” on the Venezuela operation, then humiliatingly had to admit he had no federal security clearance whatsoever.

This isn’t the first time the State Department has had to slam the brakes on Mamdani’s international freelancing. Last month, his administration planned a meeting with leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro — a man who attended a Mamdani rally in September. The State Department declined to issue Petro a visa. The meeting was canceled. And Archila separately took a two-day taxpayer-funded trip to Barcelona to attend a conference hosted by the Party of European Socialists.