The questioning of Russian journalists and their US colleagues working with Russian media are just few of the consequences of the general anti-Russian hysteria in the United States, the secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists (RUJ), Timur Shafir, told Sputnik, commenting on the questioning of a former employee of Sputnik Andrew Feinberg.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Earlier in the day, the Yahoo News portal reported citing anonymous sources that the US Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) had questioned Feinberg as part of the investigation into allegations that Sputnik acted as a Russian propaganda agency in violation of the US Foreign Agents Act (FARA). The portal claimed that the FBI had access to Sputnik's working correspondence from Feinberg and another former employee of Sputnik's Washington bureau Joseph John Fionda.

"There is no doubt that the questioning of the Sputnik employee Feinberg has only one reason, the very fact of his cooperation with the Russian media. Unfortunately, we are witnessing another wave of so-called McCarthyism in the United States. Questioning of Russian journalists or our colleagues cooperating with the Russian media, on the subject of "propaganda in violation of the law" are just one of the consequences of the general anti-Russian hysteria that now reigns in American society," Shafir, who is also a member of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), said.

The RUJ secretary said he has no doubt that FARA will soon become tougher, with more repressions against Russian journalists or those supposedly belonging to that group.

"But there is hope that history is moving in a spiral and the escalation of paranoia will never find a response in US society… Civil society played its role in the fact that the star of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the spiritual father of the current persecutors of our colleagues, has faded once and for all," Shafir recalled.

According to Shafir, history always moves in a spiral, often to the displeasure of those eager to make a cold war weapon out of journalists.