Iran’s decision to launch hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel last weekend offers a painful lesson for President Joe Biden. His policy of hoping to induce better behavior from the Islamic Republic through multibillion-dollar payoffs has been revealed as naive fiction. In fairness to Biden, this fatally misguided assumption that the mullahs want to be good-faith partners isn’t his alone. He inherited it from former President Barack Obama.
Take Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser and all-purpose mini-me. He boasted in 2016 that the administration had misrepresented the 2015 Iran nuclear accord to the public, selling Tehran as more trustworthy than they were. Rhodes added that this was no problem because the media were idiots who were easily fooled. Rhodes was so anti-Israel that his nickname in the Obama White House was “Hamas.”
At least Biden hasn’t brought Rhodes back into the West Wing, but that may be the only good news here. As the Middle East threatens to explode into a wider war, it needs to be asked how we got to the strange place where the White House considers it more important to militarily restrain our ally Israel than our enemy Iran, which has regularly denounced America as “the Great Satan” back to 1979. This is, at best, naivete on a grand scale. But is there more to it?
Here we must turn to the mysterious and troubling case of Rob Malley. He’s the Obama-Biden go-to guy on Iran. Malley holds far-left views on foreign policy, especially the Middle East, that were considered fringe even among Democrats a generation ago but are now deemed normal. Malley worked for President Bill Clinton, then served on the National Security Council during Obama’s second term as the mullah-whisperer. Malley was the driving force behind JCPOA, and once President Donald Trump killed the Iran deal in 2018, Biden brought Malley back into the White House in 2021 expressly to resurrect it.
That hasn’t happened, and it certainly won’t happen now that Iran and Israel are in a de facto open war. The other reason JCPOA isn’t coming back is because Malley’s no longer in the White House. In April 2023, Malley was quietly placed on leave when his security clearances were suspended by the State Department for unspecified reasons. Malley claimed not to know what the problem was and professed that he hoped to return to the White House eventually. In the meantime, Malley was soft-landed at Princeton University.
One year has gone by and we still don’t know why Malley’s long government career came to a screeching halt over some security issue. There are tells. His case was handed from Foggy Bottom over to the FBI for investigation, which means it’s no longer a State Department internal matter since espionage may be involved. Last August, Iranian regime media added fuel to the fire, salaciously publishing a purported State Department memo elaborating that Malley’s Top Secret clearance was pulled due to apparent mishandling of classified information. Efforts by Congress to get answers about the Malley affair led nowhere. For a year, the Biden White House has stonewalled all inquiries.
In the meantime, it’s only gotten worse. Semafor exposed an Iranian influence operation going back to 2014 called the “Iran Experts Initiative,” which featured mullah-friendly operatives who were supposed to steer U.S. policy toward Iran in ways Tehran wanted. Several of those involved with IEI were close associates of Malley, including think-tankers Dina Esfandiary and Ali Vaez, as well as Ariane Tabatabai, who since 2022 has been working in the Pentagon in a high-level job requiring Top Secret clearances, namely as chief of staff to the assistant secretary of defense for special operations.
Even though Tabatabai and other IEI members appeared to be uncomfortably close to Tehran, and some of her emails with top Iranian officials resembled a spy talking to her handler in the eyes of any counterintelligence veteran, she is still working in the Pentagon. Inexplicably, a security review in 2023 determined that Tabatabai should keep her clearances, which is highly abnormal given the circumstances.
The Biden White House has hushed this big spy scandal up, aided by the mainstream media largely ignoring it, and has proceeded as if nothing has happened. Now the Washington Examiner reports that known IEI operatives remain welcome in this administration. Esfandiary, Vaez, and Tabatabai have visited the Biden White House 10 times, including as recently as December, many months after Malley was removed from his position.
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You might think Team Biden would want to keep distance between the White House and suspected Iranian spies. You would be wrong.
The FBI is investigating Malley while the State Department is conducting its own inquiry, but that’s all we know. Repeated efforts by Congress to get more information about Malley and his associates, plus their ties to Tehran, have gotten nowhere. Rob Malley may be the Alger Hiss of his generation. The public has a right to know what happened here, particularly as a wider war with Iran looms.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.
