Who Is Maher Bitar?

One thing I've come to notice about the recent questionable diplomatic and intelligence appointments in the administration like Robert Malley and Ariane Tabatabai is how quickly their careers have taken off, although Malley's is currently on hold. As I noted with some puzzlement in this post, by the time she was about 30 as a PhD student, Tabatabai was writing in prestigious foreign policy journals and then began a meteoric rise among various university faculties, NGOs, and the RAND Corporation. Her main qualification appears to have been that she is the daughter of Javad Tabatabai, an Iranian philosopher and professor at the University of Tehran who is close to the mullahs in the government there.

Over the weekend i saw mention of a similar figure, Maher Bitar, who we're told is of Palestinian heritage, but about whom we otherwise know little besides a precocious career rise much like Tabatabai's. His profile as a member of Georgetown Law School's class of 2012 is as informative as any:

Maher Bitar serves as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Intelligence Programs on the White House’s National Security Council staff. From 2017 to early 2021, Bitar served as General Counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives’ Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Before joining the Committee, Bitar was a member of the National Security Council’s Deputies Committee from 2015 until early 2017 in his capacity as Deputy to the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations. While a career civil servant at the Department of State, Bitar served previously on the White House’s National Security Council staff and as a diplomat focused on the Middle East. Bitar holds a Juris Doctor from Georgetown Law, received a Master of Science degree from the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, and completed his undergraduate studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

A law degree in 2012 would put him in his mid-twenties at the time, which might put his birth date in the late 1980s. But even before his law degree, he seems to have attracted attention and likely influential sponsors.

As Daniel Greenfield reported at Frontpage online magazine, in 2006, as a student at Georgetown University, Bitar was a leader of the anti-Semitic, Muslim Brotherhood aligned Students for Justice in Palestine. As an SJP leader, he organized a so-called "boycott, divestment, and sanctions" campaign against Israel and its supporters on his campus. Greenfield reported that Bitar chaired a panel at a BDS conference where participants discussed how to indoctrinate Christians to believe that Israel has no right to exist.

If he was an undergraduate in 2006, this would also put his birthdate in the mid to late 1980s. He apparently left Georgetown without a bachelor's, went on to Oxford, where he received a Master's in Forced Migration about 2008 (the thesis is available online here), apparently returned to Georgetown and completed his bachelor's degree, and then earned a Georgetown law degree. It's hard to avoid thinking an influential sponsor was behind this fast track.

A federal employee profile puts Bitar working at the US State Department in foreign affairs between 2011 and 2016. He started while still a law student as a Social Science Student Trainee at -- wait for it -- $51,630 per year and wound up there as a GG-15 at $128,082 per year in 2016. At that time,

During the Obama presidency, Bitar served on the National Security Council as the Israeli-Palestinian officer. He was Samantha Power's deputy. In 2016, as UN ambassador, Power played a key role in the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which labeled Israeli neighborhoods in unified Jerusalem and Israeli towns and cities in Judea and Samaria as a "flagrant violation of international law."

But Bitar is nothing if not a polymath. When the Democrats were voted out in 2016, he moved over to serve as general counsel for the House Intelligence Committee Democrats and played a key role during the first impeachment of former President Donald Trump. Five years out of law school, an expert on Palestinians and working mostly as a diplomat, he's now a general counsel running a comic-opera impeachment.

But with the Democrats returning to the White House in January 2021, it was

announced that Maher Bitar has been appointed to serve as the senior director for Intelligence at the National Security Council. The position is one of the most powerful posts in the US intelligence community. The senior director is the node to which all intelligence from all agencies flows. He decides what to share with the President. And in the name of the President, he determines priorities for intelligence operations and collection.

. . . As one former senior national security council member explained, "The senior director for intelligence controls the information everyone sees. And by controlling information, he controls the conversation."

Usually, the sensitive position is reserved for a CIA officer who is detailed to the National Security Council. Bitar, however, is not an intelligence professional. He is an anti-Israel political activist.

It's hard to avoid thinking that influential people have been managing Bitar's career at least from his time as an undergraduate at Georgetown and have been in positions to assure his advancement at early ages for the positions he's held, like general counsel to a congressional committee or senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, even to the point where he seems to have lacked the basic qualifications for such jobs. How could this happen? This article has a hint:

Washington has announced the appointment of Maher Bitar to senior director for intelligence in President Joe Biden’s National Security Council.

He will oversee the stream of information between the White House and US intelligence agencies.

Bitar previously served as the director for Israeli-Palestinian affairs on the National Security Council under former President Barack Obama.

. . . A Palestinian source reports that messages were passed from Biden’s staff to the Palestinians through a Palestinian billionaire living in Washington in recent months and were initiated by a US diplomat of Lebanese descent, Hady Amr.

Amr, who is married to a Palestinian woman, was a member of Martin Indyk’s staff, held a number of positions in Barack Obama’s administration, and is considered to have promoted the idea of ​​alliances with Islamic elements in the Arab world.

The one message this sends to me is that people like Tabatabai and Bitar are puppets themselves and probably not very smart. We'll have to see how this shakes out.