New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani told reporters on Friday that he had been unaware that top officials in his administration planned to meet with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations earlier this month — calling the decision “an error” on the part of one of his most prominent and politically active commissioners.

Speaking after an unrelated event, the mayor maintained he only learned from a request for comment from City Journal that International Affairs Commissioner Ana Maria Archila and what the publication described as “two other senior officials” working under her had planned to sit down on Tuesday with Amir-Saeid Iravani of the Iranian Mission to the U.N. City Journal, affiliated with the right-of-center Manhattan Institute, reported that the State Department stepped in to preempt the meeting. 

“That meeting did not take place, it will not take place, and I did not know about it until there was a press inquiry regarding it,” Mamdani told reporters, vowing a change in internal policy to prevent it from occurring again. “The commissioner recognizes that this was made in error, and we’re working on a new process, in terms of new meeting requests.”

The democratic socialist stressed that the Iranian mission had reached out to his team, not the other way around, and maintained that the office’s function is to maintain the city’s international relationships.

However, City Journal and El Pais have reported that Archila has taken a decidedly political tack in her outreach to foreign governments, explicitly seeking to engage with those that are “in political alignment/leftist,” including Colombian President Gustavo Petro, a fierce critic of Israel.  

Archila first gained attention for confronting then-Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) in a Senate elevator over the nomination of now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, and subsequently ran unsuccessfully for New York lieutenant governor in 2022. Prior to joining the Mamdani administration, she served as co-director of the New York chapter of the left-wing Working Families Party.