A long-overdue reckoning over the conduct of Rob Malley, President Biden’s Iran envoy, might be on the way, however much the administration endeavors to bury the truth.
The Washington Post reported last week that members of Congress believe that Malley emailed classified documents to a personal email address and downloaded them to his personal phone from there.
Those lawmakers had done their own freelance investigative work to reach that conclusion because the State Department has been outrageously tight-lipped about the situation. After Malley failed to show up at a congressional briefing last April, officials told members of Congress that he was merely on leave rather than suspended pending the results of an investigation. Congress learned the truth through the press. The State Department appears not just to have failed to inform lawmakers about the situation but to have actively misled them.
Throughout all of this, State has handled Malley’s case with velvet gloves. Amid his suspension and ongoing probes into his conduct, he was granted permission to teach classes at Yale and Princeton.
Now, the FBI is involved, according to Politico. The bureau is looking into whether Malley committed any crimes related to his reported transfer of classified information.
Even if Malley didn’t conduct direct talks with Tehran via his own personal network, which seems possible, exposing classified documents to potential hacking operations is appalling enough.
Last year, the Tehran Times, the Iranian regime newspaper, published a letter from State’s inspector general to Malley outlining the suspension of his security clearance. At the time, members of Congress were furious that they learned about such a serious matter from Iranian state media, and the latest reporting appears to confirm the genuineness of the letter.
Malley should never have been in the vicinity of Foggy Bottom in the first place, and certainly not overseeing U.S. policy toward the Iranian terror state in the years leading up to the October 7 massacre.
He is a notoriously accommodationist figure in Biden’s administration, even by the standards of the Democratic foreign-policy establishment. As a researcher, he spent significant amounts of time with Hamas operatives, and his appointment was applauded as bringing a perspective that celebrates Palestinian nationalism and third-world anti-imperial movements into the top echelon of the U.S. government. He once said that it’s a mistake to view Hamas only in terms of its terrorist activity.
Malley is uncomfortably close to people implicated in an Iranian political-influence campaign. Bombshell reporting from last year revealed that some of his colleagues from his time at a foreign-policy think tank were part of a program run by an arm of the Iranian ministry of foreign affairs; its participants included European and American researchers of Iranian descent, some of whom showed undue deference to the Iranian regime. Malley reportedly tried to hire one of them, his protégé, for a role on his team at State (this was unsuccessful only because that individual could not pass a background check).
The possibilities here are concerning, to say the least. But don’t expect any voluntary transparency from State if Malley is proven to have engaged in serious misconduct. Congress clearly isn’t being meaningfully briefed on the situation, despite the extraordinary, yearlong suspension of a top official with one of the most sensitive assignments in U.S. government.
The Obama-Biden clique’s approach to American statecraft plainly prefers granting inducements to Iran that benefit its terror apparatus abroad, while shrugging off any oversight at home and tarring the critics as warmongers.
Between the latest Malley revelations and Iran’s direct hand in massacres of Israelis and Americans in the terrorist attack on October 7, getting to the bottom of the Malley affair should be a major investigative priority of the House GOP.
Put simply: The American people deserve to know if the geniuses at State fed classified info to the arsonists who set the Middle East ablaze.