The Curious Case of Rob Malley
by Peter Schweizer • November 21, 2023 at 5:00 am
More bad news for Malley emerged recently when a large cache of Iranian government correspondence and emails was revealed by Semafor and Iran International. In email exchanges between Iranian Foreign Ministry officials working under the supposedly moderate then President Hassan Rouhani, they congratulate each other for the public success of what they called the "Iran Experts Initiative (IEI)," a propaganda effort they created back in 2014, and reportedly "funded and directed by an IRGC official...
The IEI cultivated a network of sympathetic academics and intellectuals "with the aim of shaping political and public opinion as the Iranian government, then led by Hassan Rouhani, pursued a nuclear deal with the U.S."
Other former officials told the Daily Caller that Malley and a previous advisor of his, Ariane Tabatabai, who holds a senior, security clearance level job at the Defense Department, are "compromised" and had no place running Washington's Iran policy.
Tabatabai is still employed at the Pentagon where, noted the investigative reporter Lee Smith, "she has been serving as chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Christopher Maier... Tabatabai's emails show her enthusiastically submitting to the control of top Iranian officials, who then guided her efforts to propagandize and collect intelligence on U.S. and allied officials in order to advance the interests of the Islamic Republic."
"The contents of the emails," wrote Lee Smith, "are damning, showing a group of Iranian American academics being recruited by the Iranian regime, meeting together in foreign countries to receive instructions from top regime officials, and pledging their personal loyalty to the regime....
Tabatabai still has high-level security clearance and access to classified information. The FBI has reportedly "refused to remove her." So, while Israel fights for its existence, a genocidal Iran is using three of its proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis in Yemen — Tabatabai, who according to Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), "had the mission of influencing U.S. policymakers to agree with what the Iranian government wanted," may be sending classified information about planned U.S. and Israeli military moves back to Iran.... What could possibly go wrong?
[The] use of the term "cosmopolitan" here hits on a core tenet of New Left ideology, where concern for one's own country is seen as jingoism, and the welfare of other nations, even those openly hostile to the US, occupies the highest priority.
How was [Ms. Tabatabai's] "top level security clearance" approved and why is she still employed in a senior position at the Pentagon?
[T]he case of Rob Malley indicates a deeper rot in our politics.... [Malley] is far closer to those Ivy League professors currently tweeting gleefully in favor of... the terrorist group Hamas, just to cite the most current example.
It is a wonder Malley ever passed a background check in the first place.
Hamas's war against Israel, coordinated with Iran, has exposed the fault lines in the American Left.
While mainstream Democratic liberals have sided with the innocent Israelis massacred by Hamas terrorists, leftist "Squad" members in Congress compete with Ivy League campus radicals to outdo one another by championing the vicious murderers as a "resistance."
Anti-Israel sentiment has been oozing through those cracks on the Left for years, but the presidency of Barack Obama certainly primed the pump. Obama's choice of advisors reflected his deep distrust of Israel and penchant for supporting Palestinians and appeasing Iran. One of those advisor choices, the now-disgraced Robert Malley, is a case-in-point.
This summer, Malley was placed on unpaid leave from the State Department and had his security clearance revoked after an internal investigation found he had "mishandled classified information."
