An Iran disaster of Biden’s own making
Seth Mandel
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Princeton University’s announcement that it has hired President Joe Biden’s senior Iran envoy Robert Malley is full of praise for Malley’s career experience, and it notes that Malley is spending time this fall at the school while he is “on leave” from the State Department. In what I’m sure is an innocent oversight, the press release neglects to explain why Malley is suddenly on leave and available to spend a semester or more at Princeton in the midst of the administration’s ongoing negotiations with Iran.
Malley has lost his security clearance and has reportedly been under FBI investigation for mishandling classified information.
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The Biden administration has lied repeatedly, to members of Congress of both parties and other State Department officials, about Malley’s transgressions, so the Princeton announcement is useful. The Biden White House has forced the public to play Kremlinology, reading scraps of information to attempt to piece together what on earth its secretive, borderline-paranoiac government is doing.
The administration — and I’ll explain why in a bit — is unbothered by Malley’s lapses. It kept him on his tasks after he lost his security clearance and even after it could no longer hide his clearance suspension.
Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) of the foreign relations committee and ally of President Biden, told CBS last month he had not been briefed and that “there is a lot of concern and interest in Congress on that committee and others about the status of any potential negotiation with Iran.”
He continued, “The Iranians are providing the Russians critical drones and munitions for their aggression in Ukraine. I think that puts even greater tension on any possible conversations between the United States, our regional allies, and Iran. And I do think we need a briefing to update the members of Congress.”
Princeton’s decision to pick up Malley’s paycheck until the government is allowed to pay him again is an interesting move. The university is acting as an arm of the Biden administration while making a mockery of both the FBI investigation and national security more broadly, though the latter is perfectly in character.
Why isn’t the White House the least bit bothered by the national security implications of Malley’s actions?
Because he’s doing precisely what he was asked to do. Malley was hired primarily to get the United States back in a deal with Iran that would legitimize Tehran’s nuclear program the way President Obama’s deal did initially before President Trump withdrew from it.
Malley isn’t there to “negotiate” in the usual sense of the word; he’s there to beg and bribe his Iranian interlocutors. To do so, as Lee Smith has noted at Tablet, “A large part of Malley’s work was to circulate information throughout the U.S.-based Iranian diaspora that eventually found its way to Tehran. According to Iran press reports that have foreign policy circles talking, those contacts are what got him in trouble.”
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Those Iran press reports are designed to be self-serving, so they cannot be taken at face value. But their existence tells us something: Malley got in over his head in dealing with Iranian factions, and someone in Iran wants him to think he picked the wrong horse.
Just as Biden did when he hired Rob Malley.