So, What's Our Iran Policy Now?

Just poking around the web for information on the on again-off again $6 billion payment to Iran, I found this as of June 16:

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected reports Friday that Washington and Tehran were close to deals on limiting Iran's nuclear program and releasing U.S. citizens detained in the country.

"With regard to Iran, some of the reports that we've seen about an agreement on nuclear matters or, for that matter, on detainees, are simply not accurate and not true," Blinken said when asked about indirect talks via Oman.

As of August 10, we heard this:

The United States and Iran reached a deal on August 10 for Tehran’s release of five Iranian-American dual nationals to house arrest in exchange for Washington’s release of several jailed Iranians and the unfreezing of about $6 billion in Iranian oil revenue.

. . . The latest prisoner release is not the first time Iran has demanded ransom payments in exchange for releasing hostages. In 2015 and early 2016, the Obama administration negotiated a similar scheme alongside the nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, sending Iran $400 million — the first installment of a $1.7 billion payment — as Tehran released four Americans.

As of yesterday,

The U.S. and Qatari governments have agreed to block Iran from accessing any of the $6 billion it gained access to as part of a prisoner swap deal between the Biden administration and Tehran last month, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo told House Democrats on Thursday, according to three sources familiar with his remarks, two of whom were in the room.

. . . The administration has faced bipartisan pressure to block Iran’s access to the money as U.S. officials continue to investigate whether Iran had any direct involvement in Hamas' terrorist attack on Israel. The Biden administration has said Tehran could use the $6 billion only for humanitarian assistance.

Secretary Blinken now hedges:

During a portion of an interview with NBC News set to air on Thursday’s broadcast of “NBC Nightly News,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that the $6 billion in Iranian assets unfrozen by a prisoner swap deal the Biden administration brokered was money Iran was allowed to accrue under the Trump administration and Iran has “always been allowed to use” these funds for humanitarian reasons, but “for technical reasons, Iran was having trouble actually using the funds,” and the Biden administration moved it to a different account, “where the money could actually be used, but under the supervision of our Treasury Department, only for humanitarian purposes.”

. . . "And not a dollar of that money has been spent to date. And we retain the right to freeze that account.”

So it wasn't going to happen, but then it did, but it was Trump's fault, and we're maybe gonna freeze it, or maybe not, according to some people who were in the room. I don't buy a billion of it.

Meanwhile, the guy who was Blinken's special envoy to Iran, Robert Malley, who would have been the point man for this whole deal, had his security clearance suspended, was taken off the project, and was not allowed in the building sometime between April and June of this year, when Blinken originally said nobody was close on a deal -- er, what deal?

The deal that isn't taking place, of course. What other deal could there be?

Something's really, really hinky here, and nobody's asking questions. I asked on Wednesday what the real agenda would be on Blinken's trip to Israel. One question that popped into my mind was the timing of Isreal's declaration of a national unity government:

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, an opposition party leader, announced they have reached an agreement to form an emergency unity government in the wake of attacks launched by the militant group Hamas.

The Jerusalem Post reported on Wednesday that both sides came to an agreement after meeting at the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) headquarters in Tel Aviv.

I think this was to forestall any attempt by Blinken to play sides against Netanyahu. Biden clearly doesn't like Netanyahu, and Netanyahu trusts neither Biden nor Blinken. The Israelis are certainly aware of the reality that they play a role in US politics:

Two separate U.S. State Department tweets calling for Israel to stop its counterstrikes against Hamas terrorists in Gaza are now deleted.

It follows fierce backlash against the agency for seeming to suggest Israel doesn't have a right to defend itself or engage in counter operations after Palestinian fundamentalists launched a multi-front surprise attack on Saturday.

I get the impression that Netanyahu at this point has the upper hand.

What Else Can We Discover About Ariane Tabatabai?

Recent developments have focused attention on Ariane Tabatabai, in particular that she is currently Chief of Staff for the US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict. On the other hand, a web search brings up what almost looks like too much information.

She appears on web sites as adjunct professor at Goergetown University, Middle East Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and an adjunct senior research scholar at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, which says of her

Ariane M. Tabatabai is an associate political scientist at the RAND Corporation. Prior to joining RAND, she served as the director of curriculum and a visiting assistant professor of security studies at the Georgetown University Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and an international civilian consultant for NATO. Previously, Tabatabai was a post-doctoral fellow (2017-18) in the International Security Program and a Stanton nuclear security fellow (2013-14) in the International Security Program and the Project on Managing the Atom at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs where she was also an associate (2014–2015). Tabatabai also held positions as a non-resident scholar with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute; senior associate in the Proliferation Prevention Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and adjunct senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Center for A New American Security (CNAS). She holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from King's College London. She is the co-author of Triple Axis: Iran's Relations With Russia and China and has published widely in academic, policy, and mainstream outlets, including International Security, the Journal of Strategic Studies, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy.

This frankly makes my head spin. Why isn't this woman already queen of the world? She also has a Wikipedia entry that isn't helpful in putting any of the above in context:

Ariane Tabatabai (Persian: آرین طباطبایی, born in Tabriz) is a former senior policy advisor to the United States Department of Defense who has vowed allegiance to the Iranian government. She is a graduate of King's College London and the daughter of Javad Tabatabai, an Iranian philosopher and professor at the University of Tehran.

It doesn't give a birth date. LinkedIn shows her with a BA from SUNY Stony Brook in 2008, an MA in International Peace and Security from Kings College London in 2011, and a PhD in War Studies from Kings College London in 2015. The 2008 BA might place her birth date in the mid to late 1980s, but other dates for her career milestones are difficult to determine. So far, I've been unable to find out how and when, if she was born in Tabriz according to Wikipedia, she found her way to the US and study at SUNY Stony Brook, and how she excelled here to the point of moving to Kings College London. Her father continues to be thriving in Iran under the current regime there.

She first appears in the Semafor article writing e-mails to senior Iranian diplomatic figures in 2014, which would place her at Kings College London finishing her PhD.

Ariane Tabatabai, the current Pentagon official, on at least two occasions checked in with Iran’s Foreign Ministry before attending policy events, according to the emails. She wrote to [Mostafa] Zahrani [former director general of strategic affairs in the foreign ministry] in Farsi on June 27, 2014, to say she’d met Saudi Prince Turki al Faisal — a former ambassador to the U.S. — who expressed interest in working together and invited her to Saudi Arabia.

. . . Ariane Tabatabai told Zahrani that she was slated to give testimony before the U.S. Congress on the nuclear deal. On July 10, 2014, she wrote that she had been asked to appear before multiple congressional committees alongside two Harvard academics — Gary Samore and William Tobey — whom she viewed as hawkish on Iran. “I will bother you in the coming days. It will be a little difficult since both Will and Gary do not have favorable views on Iran,” she wrote.

.. . Tabatabai shared a link with Zahrani to an article she’d published in the Boston Globe that outlined the “Five Myths about Iran’s Nuclear Program.” The piece explained why Iran needs nuclear power and highlighted a fatwa, or religious edict, that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei allegedly issued forbidding the development of nuclear weapons as un-Islamic. Some Western officials have questioned the legitimacy of the fatwa.

It appears that she then began a meteoric rise among various university faculties, NGOs, and the RAND Corporation, although so far, the precise dates of all these connections have proven difficult to pin down. The Wikipedia entry suggests that at least by 2021, she'd attracted the attention of Robert Malley:

After the Biden administration took office in January 2021, she joined the US negotiating team in nuclear negotiations with Iran, but together with Richard Nephew, she left the team after a few months due to differences with Robert Malley, the head of the US negotiating team, and also because they believed that US would lift too many sanctions on Iran and consequently the possible agreement would not be strong enough.

The precise timing and details of the working relationship between Malley and Tabatabai before 2021 and after the apparent split while she worked for him in the State Department are unclear. Richard Nephew, with whom she apparently worked while on the Iran negotiating team, is listed on the US State Department website as follows:

Secretary Blinken announced Richard Nephew as the Department of State’s Coordinator on Global Anti-Corruption on July 5, 2022. Nephew is returning to the Department from Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, where he was a Senior Research Scholar. He is a published author, including of a book, chapters for edited volumes, and articles on sanctions, deterrence, and nuclear proliferation. Prior to his tenure at Columbia, Nephew served as deputy special envoy for Iran, Principal Deputy Coordinator for Sanctions Policy, and Director for Iran on the National Security Staff. He also served in the Department’s Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, as well as in the Office of Nonproliferation and International Security at the Department of Energy. Nephew holds an MA in Security Policy Studies and a BA in International Affairs from The George Washington University.

For now, the most I can surmise from this sketchy information is that Ariane Tabatabai and Richard Nephew are new members of a strange menagerie associated with Antony Blinken, a group we've so far come to know includes Amos Hochstein, Robert Malley, and Blinken himself. Blinken, Hochstein, Malley, and Tabatabai in particular appear to be part of a supranational elite, born or educated outside the US, with strong international connections that appear to have fast-tracked them through academic and diplomatic careers from the start. All have prestigious credentials related to Iran, national security, and energy.

It's mildly reassuring that in addition to the letter to Blinken from the House Oversight Committee that I linked yesterday, other Republicans are on the case:

Sen. James Risch (R., Idaho) and Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas)—the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, respectively—are asking the State Department for information on whether Malley was compromised by the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI), a vast Iranian government-controlled propaganda operation that allegedly includes at least three of the diplomat's close associates, including one who works at the Pentagon and has a security clearance.

Although the letter refers specifically to an Iranian influence operation called the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI), it isn't clear that Tabatabai was ever part of the IEI. The Iran International piece shows her sending Zahrani links to articles she'd published in 2014 advocating Iran's position on the nuclear negotiations, but I would question whether IEI or other enablers assisted in these publications. She seems in fact to have had a large number of well-placed enablers who could put her, hardly over 30 and with little experience outside the classroom, into prestigious and influential positions in universities, the Rand Corporation, NGOs, and ultimately the Defense Department, despite what some commentators have noted were security red flags on her record.

We're only at the base of this learning curve.

Weren't There Two Intelligence Failures?

I notice as of this morning that the narrative has shifted: over the weekend, and due in large part to the revelations about Robert Malley that emerged in the Tablet report I've linked here, there were initially two intellegence failures, one at the Mossad, which didn't see the Hamas attack from Gaza coming, and one at the FBI, where an Iranian agent, Ariane Tabatabai, currently works as Chief of Staff for the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict.

This came on the heels of the revelation that Robert Malley, US Special Envoy to Iran and the architect of Democrat Iran policy since the Clinton administration, had had his security clearance suspended and been placed on leave from his position between April and June of this year. Neither the State nor the Defense Department has been responsive to congressional requests for explanation, and Tabatabai remains in her Defense Department position. As of today, this is all off the radar.

Larry Johnson at Gateway Pundit is one of the few writers who's even addressed the Israeli intelligence failure side of the question. I appreciate him for that, although I have to keep in mind that he's best known from his days as a 1990s talking head on the PBS News Hour, when he minimized the Al Qaeda threat not long before 9/11. But as of this morning, he says of the Israeli side:

Hamas is old school when it comes to plotting and planning. The Hamas leaders, I am told, shy away from social media, computers, smart phones and text messages (even WhatsAp and Signal). The do the planning and scheming in person or via couriers with hand written documents. How do you get that information? You have to recruit a spy — someone who is part of the network who will agree to rat on his friends. Despite a reputation for having quite a stable of human assets in terrorist groups, it appears Israel came up dry with a Hamas source.

There is a report that Egypt may have warned Israel. I find that plausible. That means that Mossad did not find the report credible or ignored it. That does happen in these intelligence organizations. But that is not some evil plot, that is good, old-fashioned human incompetence.

I e-mailed Johnson at Gateway Pundit asking why, with his intelligence background, he hasn't yet given equivalent commentary on the Malley-Tabatabai affair.

As of this morning, though, it's plain that the House Republicans are on the case.

House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) and Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs Chairman Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) are continuing oversight of the Biden Administration’s failed Iran policy and are raising concerns about the Administration’s use of officials with sympathetic ties to the Iranian regime to negotiate with Iran. In a letter to U.S. Department of State Secretary Antony Blinken, the lawmakers request documents, information, and a briefing to assist the Committee’s investigation.

“The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is investigating the Biden Administration’s efforts to conceal details about its ongoing secret nuclear negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran from Congress, ignoring statutory obligations for congressional oversight. The Administration’s lack of transparency is even more troubling in light of press reports about Iran’s direct role in this weekend’s horrific attack on Israel by Hamas and additional revelations that former Special Envoy for Iran (SEI), Robert Malley, and members of his negotiating team may have had compromising ties to the Iranian regime. We request documents, information, and a briefing to assist the Committee’s investigation of these matters,” said the lawmakers.

. . . “According to recent media reports, a former member of Mr. Malley’s Iran negotiating team, Ariane Tabatabai, was in close contact with the Iranian regime for years. Ms. Tabatabai participated in the regime-backed Iran Experts Initiative (IEI), which was launched by senior Iranian Foreign Ministry officials in the spring of 2014. The alleged purpose of the initiative was to cultivate a network of European and U.S. researchers that could be used to bolster Iran’s image on global security matters, especially its nuclear program. Its members reportedly worked very closely with the Iranian regime toward this end. Incredibly, despite her previous contact with Iranian regime officials through this unofficial regime-backed network, including consulting with them regarding her potential travel, Ms. Tabatabai is now a high-level staffer within the Department of Defense where she continues to hold a security clearance,” the letter continued.

Meanwhile, Secretary Blinken is traveling to Israel, with little specific being said:

Tomorrow, I will leave for Israel to engage with our Israeli partners directly about the situation on the ground and to discuss ways we can continue to support them in the fight against these terrorist attacks. Our support for Israel remains unwavering.

— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) October 10, 2023

I wouldn't be surprised if Malley and Tabatabai were on the actual agenda.

There Aren't Any Surprises Here

There's been a near-immediate consensus that the Hamas invasion over the weekend was a failure of Israeli intelligence, less so that US intelligence missed anything.

NBC’s Kristen Welker pressed Blinken on “Meet the Press” on whether it was an intelligence failure. Blinken said that the violence in the region was “an attack that I don’t think anyone saw coming,” but fell short of calling it a failure.

. . . Deputy national security adviser Jon Finer also dodged answering whether it was a failure, again reiterating that there will be time in the future to look into it.

So far, only a few observers are looking at the causes of the invasion. Yesterday's New York Post editorial is a good start:

The Obama administration’s vision saw an empowered Iran as a fulcrum to force action from Israel on the Palestinian question.

Thus the Iran deal, which set the mullahs on the path toward nuclear breakout and regional hegemony they are now speeding down.

. . . Obama’s White House marketed this as “realism.”

It was no such thing but rather part of a pernicious and (as we have now seen) wantonly destructive radical idealism that blamed America and her allies, like Israel, for all global suffering.

The Trump years saw an interruption: a withdrawal from the Iran deal and a return to a close alliances with our actual allies in the region.

But as I posted yesterday, the key figure in this Iran policy since the Clinton administration has been Robert Malley. But it appears that the Deep State had developed certain reservations about Malley months before the invasion, having his security clearance revoked and then putting him on unpaid leave between April and June of this year. According to a story yesterday in the New York Post,

“Rob Malley deserves extensive scrutiny — yesterday, today and tomorrow,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) told The Post after the Wall Street Journal reported that officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps planned and signed off on this weekend’s atrocity that killed at least 900.

“These reports could not be more concerning, and they hint at what could be the worst State Department scandal since Alger Hiss,” Issa added.

“Malley and others created an incredibly permissive environment for Hamas, for Iran, to do all these things,” added Gabriel Noronha, a former special adviser on Iran at the State Department.

The problem for now is that we know that Malley had somehow gotten crosswise with the Deep State, we know nothing of the details, and the Deep State hasn't been telling us. As of late September, according to House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul,

Every day, the Rob Malley saga gets more alarming. Not only is the Special Envoy for Iran being investigated by the FBI after having his security clearance suspended, new reports allege an official responsible for supporting his Iran negotiating team was a core member of an Iranian-run influence campaign. Somehow this official was able to get a security clearance in spite of that, and now works in a senior position at the Defense Department. Between these egregious violations of trust by Biden officials, their mind-boggling $6 billion hostage deal that enriched the largest state-sponsor of terror, and their refusal to enforce sanctions, the Biden administration’s weak Iran policy is emboldening a dangerous adversary. The American people deserve transparency on the Malley saga immediately.

This was more than a week before the Hamas attack on Israel, but it's plain that thr concern about Malley was well-founded. Even as of July, the State Department was stonewalling requests about the issue:

As a senior Department official charged with a highly sensitive role, Special Envoy Malley enjoyed access to critical intelligence and numerous senior State Department, Executive Branch, and foreign officials. It is alarming that the Department chooses to withhold even the most basic of details from Congress, such as the timeline of Special Envoy Malley’s leave, clearance status, accesses, and foreign contacts. The Committee expects prompt and full compliance with its requests, and it will not tolerate obstruction of its oversight of this national security matter.

As of August 22, Chairman McCaul had received no response, which he'd requested by July 26. On August 22, he and Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman Brian Mast wrote to Secretary Blinken again renewing the request:

Accordingly, we are writing to directly reiterate our request that the Department notify and brief the Committee upon any relevant developments regarding the status of Mr. Malley’s employment and his ability to access classified information at the Department. This request is even more important with the recent news that Mr. Malley will be joining both Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs as a visiting professor and guest lecturer, and Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs as a senior fellow. Both developments would suggest a change to his employment status and that he will be leaving the State Department.

To improve communication and transparency with Congress going forward, we also request that the Department notify and brief this Committee when an Assistant Secretary or higher, a Deputy Chief of Mission or higher, or an individual who is a direct report to you, such as a Special Envoy, has their clearance suspended or revoked.

Both the House Republicans were making the point over last summer that Malley's apparent departure from the State Department and his position as a direct report to Secretary Blinken under security-related circumstances were matters of concern. In a search as of this morning, I've been unable to find any reference to a reply from Blinken to the House Republicans' August 22 letter.

We have a lot more to learn. The Tablet article I linked yesterday makes the point,

It seems likely that by the time of her appointment to the Pentagon’s special operations office, [Malley protégé Ariane] Tabatabai’s covert activities on behalf of the Iranian regime were well known in Biden administration and intelligence circles.

But this implies that Malley's intelligence activities must have been just as well known -- with the exception that Malley was a direct report, as a Special Envoy, to Secretary Blinken. And Blinken has so far resisted attempts to investigate why Malley's security clearance was revoked.

My instinct tells me Blinken will now be the first, but not the last, Biden cabinet member to go. The Republicans definitely now need a new and more aggressive speaker. My guess is this will outdo Alger Hiss as a State Department scandal. Hiss made the State Department look bad and Nixon look good, but nobody made the Secretary of State resign.

Robert Malley -- How Did This Story Get Lost?

As of this posting, Robert Malley's Wikipedia entry is a version that was last updated on October 3, in response to an October 1 story in the Tablet that I linked yesterday. The Wikipedia entry notes, "On June 29, 2023, Malley was placed on unpaid leave as special envoy to Iran, his security clearance was suspended amid an investigation into possible mishandling of classified material."

I took note of the Tablet story only over this current weekend, assuming it must have been part of the prior weekend's bad news dump. But as I dug deeper, the story is months old. It was covered in a Washington Post op-ed on September 6, referring to events four months earlier:

Anyone who criticized the Chinese government for its secrecy surrounding the disappearance of former foreign minister Qin Gang (including me) is guilty of hypocrisy unless they acknowledge that the U.S. government is being similarly opaque about the fate of one of America’s top diplomats. Congress and the American people deserve to know more about what’s going on with the State Department’s Iran envoy Robert Malley.

. . . Until four months ago, Malley was leading the U.S. diplomatic effort on Iran’s nuclear program and the fate of U.S. hostages held by Tehran. But it was only two months ago that Congress and the public learned — from the media — that the State Department had suspended his security clearance because of an investigation into a possible mishandling of classified information. It’s since emerged that the FBI is also investigating this matter. (In some cases, mishandling classified information may constitute a federal crime.)

. . . we now know, through leaked U.S. government documents published by the state-controlled Tehran Times, that Malley was informed on April 21 that he was under investigation for mishandling protected information and that his security clearance was suspended. Yet the State Department told Congress and the public nothing about this for weeks, and Malley continued to conduct some of his duties that did not require a security clearance.

Note that the April 21 date for his security clearance suspension conflicts with the Wikipedia date of June 29, when he was also placed on leave. But prior to either of those dates, his main job had been to negotiate the complex $6 billion hostage exchange deal with Iran that's currently being criticized as funding the Hamas invasion of Israel, although his full range of duties was much broader. The Wikipedia entry says,

On January 28, 2021, President Biden named Malley U.S. special envoy to Iran, where he was tasked with trying to ease diplomatic tensions with Iran and rein in its nuclear program by compliance to the original pact.

He had previously served in the Clinton administration from 1998 as Special Assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs, a post he held until the end of the administration in 2001. Then, according to Wikipedia,

Malley provided informal advice to the [Obama] campaign in the past without having any formal role in the campaign. On May 9, 2008, the campaign severed ties with Malley when the British Times reported that Malley had been in discussions with the militant Palestinian group Hamas, listed by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization. In response, Malley told The Times he had been in regular contact with Hamas officials as part of his work with the International Crisis Group. "My job with the International Crisis Group is to meet with all sorts of savory and unsavory people and report on what they say. I've never denied whom I meet with; that's what I do", Malley told NBC News, adding that he informs the State Department about his meetings beforehand and briefs them afterward.

The New York Times reported on 18 February 2014 that Malley was joining the Obama administration to consult on Persian Gulf policy as senior director of the National Security Council. On 6 March, the National Security Council announced that Malley would be replacing Philip Gordon as the Special Assistant to the President and White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf Region, effective on 6 April 2015.

Malley's background is upper-upper crust. Again via Wikipedia,

Robert attended École Jeannine Manuel, a prestigious bilingual school in Paris, and graduated in the same class (1980) as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

. . . Malley attended Yale University, and was a 1984 Rhodes Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he earned a D.Phil. in political philosophy. There he wrote his doctoral thesis about Third-worldism and its decline. Malley continued writing about foreign policy, including extended commentary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He earned a J.D. at Harvard Law School, where he met his future wife, Caroline Brown. Another fellow law school student was Barack Obama. In 1991–1992, Malley clerked for Supreme Court Justice Byron White, while Brown clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

At this point, all we know is that Malley's security clearance is suspended, he's on leave from the State Department, and neither the FBI nor the State Department will say much more. The target="_blank">most visible allegation against Malley is that he

helped to infiltrate an Iranian agent of influence named Ariane Tabatabai into some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. government—first at the State Department and now the Pentagon, where she has been serving as chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Christopher Maier.

On Thursday [September 28], Maier told a congressional committee that the Defense Department is “actively looking into whether all law and policy was properly followed in granting my chief of staff top secret special compartmented information.”

. . . Malley’s protégé was an active participant in a covert Iranian influence campaign designed to shape U.S. government policy in order to serve the interests of the Iranian regime. Her requests for guidance from top Iranian officials, which she appears to have faithfully followed, and her desire to harmonize her own words and actions with regime objectives, are hardly the behavior of an impartial academic, or a U.S. public servant. 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.

. . . It seems likely that by the time of her appointment to the Pentagon’s special operations office, Tabatabai’s covert activities on behalf of the Iranian regime were well known in Biden administration and intelligence circles. “The hoops you have to jump through to get a bare-bones top secret clearance even without compartments or special access programs are enormous,” says [retired CIA analyst Peter] Theroux. “They grill you on your foreign contacts. Contacts with any foreign government raise more red flags than Bernie Sanders’ honeymoon. Contacts with senior officials from enemy governments, classified as non-frat governments like Russia, China, Cuba, as well as Iran, are in a different category altogether—what would normally be totally disqualifying.”

. . . Why an Iranian operative is still at the Pentagon, especially in a job which gives her daily access to classified information that puts the country’s most sensitive military operations at risk, is another matter entirely. “The optimistic reading,” says Theroux, “is that they were watching her to see what she does and the FBI has her apartment all teched up. But to be an optimist you have to believe the FBI is clean, rather than see this as a huge counterintelligence failure. Though, of course, it’s not a failure if they were complicit.”

Irrespective of any further investigation of the Malley-Tabatabai association, the Hamas invasion of Israel is beginning to look like a major intelligence failure for both Israel and the US and a diplomatic disaster for the US. So far, the Malley-Tabatabai affair seems to be a key part of the story. It's remarkable how little interest either legacy media or Conservative Inc has shown in it so far.

My impression is that Malley's potential role as an Iranian agent of influence is a scandal as big as, if not bigger, than the Cambridge Stalinist spies in the UK or Alger Hiss in the US. It's worth noting that the UK in particular has spent generations coming to grips with the Cambridge spies. Robert Malley seems to be a somewhat parallel case, an individual apparently considered beyond reproach given his elite background, and fast-tracked through the Ivy establishment -- but at some point, he appears to have been recruited for the dark side.

Contexts We Aren't Examining In The Hamas Invasion Of Israel

The news of an attack on Israel leading to the first declaration of war in 50 years has mostly raised questions for me about contexts that I'd been noticing for some time. The first is Biden's recent slights against both Israel's President Herzog, on which I posted here, and Prime Minister Netanyahu, which I covered in this post. On July 18,

President Joe Biden seemingly fell asleep today while sputtering gibberish during a high-level meeting with the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog.

“The Israelis and the Palestinians… uh… on a political level… They uh, and… uh… They uh… And, I… Agwai endhole and whole shegwam… And uh…” said Biden.

My assessment at the time was that this was deliberate, an indication at best that Isreal's head of state wasn't worth Joe's full attention, however pro forma this might seem. Then there was a not fully unequivocal exchange with Prime Minister Netanyahu on September 20:

Biden noted that he worked with Netanyahu as a freshman senator, joking that he “gave up counting” how long they had been friends, with Netanyahu adding later that it had been “over 40 years.”

Biden, however, crossed himself when Netanyahu referred to the 40 years, an ambiguous gesture at best that I thought at the time corresponded to the cryptic "God save the queen" remark he occasionally makes to indicate some level of skepticism over whatever is being discussed.

Then there's the peculiar correspondence between a $6 billion transfer to Iran, whose proxy Hamas invaded Israel yesterday:

According to Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Iran sends $100 million annually to Hamas, $700 million annually to Hezbollah, and tens of millions to Islamic Jihad. Hamas also uses Iranian technology and logistical support to produce arms locally. What Hamas does not produce it smuggles into the Mediterranean enclave from tunnels under its border with Egypt.

Republican presidential candidates have claimed that the $6 billion to Iran funded the Hamas invasion:

Trump, like others, directly blamed the $6 billion — “American taxpayer dollars helped fund these attacks,” he said in an earlier statement — and argued that, under Biden, the U.S. is perceived as being “weak and ineffective” on the global stage, opening the door to hostility.

“They didn’t have that level of aggression with me. They didn’t have it. This would have never happened with me either,” Trump claimed, adding later in Cedar Rapids that Biden had “betrayed Israel” with the deal.

But every story from the Hamas invasion to bite reports on poor canine Commander seem to have kept the story of the Iran spy ring from getting the prominence it should have:

The Biden administration’s now-suspended Iran envoy Robert Malley helped to fund, support, and direct an Iranian intelligence operation designed to influence the United States and allied governments, according to a trove of purloined Iranian government emails. . . . They showed that Malley had helped to infiltrate an Iranian agent of influence named Ariane Tabatabai into some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. government—first at the State Department and now the Pentagon, where she has been serving as chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Christopher Maier.

. . . The contents of the emails 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. They also show how these operatives used their Iranian heritage and Western academic positions to influence U.S. policy toward Iran, first as outside “experts” and then from high-level U.S. government posts. Both inside and outside of government, the efforts of members of this circle were repeatedly supported and advanced by Malley, who served as the U.S. government’s chief interlocutor with Iran under both the Obama and the Biden administrations. Malley is also the former head of the International Crisis Group (ICG), which directly paid and credentialed several key members of the regime’s influence operation.

The picture that's tardily emerging from the Malley-Tabatabai revelations strikes me as analogous at least to the allegations against Alger Hiss, though it's hard even now to imagine Hiss as an active Stalinist, as opposed to an elitist dreamer. Malley and Tabatabai operated at a much more practical and detailed level, and they clearly had direct policy impacts. It's hard to avoid thinking they influenced the $6 billion payment to Iran and facilitated plans for the Hamas invasion.

What did Biden and his handlers know? Was the Malley-Tabatabai group paying any of them? Even leaving questions of payment to the Bidens for policy decisions aside, this Iran spy ring cries out for serious investigation, especially in the context of the new Hamas-Israel war.

What's Going On With Joe, His Dogs, And The Secret Service?

REPORT: President Biden has “mistreated” his dogs by punching and kicking them according to sources close with Judicial Watch.

Biden’s dogs are just like his son: Poorly trained.

Documents from the United States Department of Homeland Security, reveal injuries from attacks… pic.twitter.com/dDGRuYxc1P

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) October 6, 2023

The video in the post at X above bothers me in several ways. I've had five pet dogs in my life, none has been a German shepherd, but I think dog body language is pretty consistent across breeds. What I see in the video, if that's his most recent dog, Commander, is Commander being led off the helicopter by Joe and promptly becoming confused. He's on a leash, Joe heads for the limo, Commander hangs back and in fact turns the other way. As best I can read, Commander has his head low and is wagging his tail more or less level to the ground, indicating he's not sure what to do.

Joe somewhat awkwardly gathers Commander in, first with his arms, but then with his knees, shoves him toward the limo door, and then impatiently and forcefully urges him inside with the action of his legs. I would say he doesn't quite kick Commander, but Commander sure doesn't want to get into that limo. (As a lifelong pet owner, I would almost say Commander is playing dumb.) At best, all I can say is this isn't how you get a dog to cooperate. I've also got to think this relationship has been going on for a while. Dogs want to bond with their owners. Dogs want to be with the program. One basic thing dogs want to do, always and everywhere, is hop in the car. Something here isn't working.

I'm sensing other vibes here, too. The limo and the helicopter seem to be drawn up so close that it looks awkward for Joe to get into the limo, dog or no dog. I assume the Secret Service choreographs the transfer, and maybe a little like Commander himself, they seem to want to make all this a little harder then it needs to be. Even the Marine sergeant who salutes Joe on his way out seems to be briskly saluting a mote in the middle distance, not Joe the man. These people don't like Joe.

Searching the web, I'm finding this isn't new. Here's a post in The Hill from last December:

President Biden doesn’t trust some of the Secret Service agents around him and doesn’t believe certain details of the biting incident with his dog Major, according to a new book about the administration.

Chris Whipple’s “The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House” says Biden has trust issues with some agents, due in part to the fact that some agents are strong supporters of former President Trump.

. . . There are also issues around the March 2021 incident in which Major, the president’s German shepherd rescue dog, allegedly bit a Secret Service agent. The president was reportedly skeptical about the Secret Service’s report of the situation.

Biden “wasn’t buying the details,” such as the location of the incident, although he didn’t dispute that the bite took place, Whipple wrote. Biden told a friend that Secret Service agents are never at the location of the incident, which was allegedly on the second floor of the White House.

“Somebody was lying, Biden thought, about the way the incident had gone down,” Whipple wrote.

Major, who is believed to be the first shelter rescue animal to live at the White House, received private training following the biting incident. Biden at the time defended Major and said he is a “sweet” animal simply adjusting to life in the White House alongside Secret Service details.

Major was removed from the White House on December 21, 2021 after numerous biting indicents and replaced by Commander. In fact, it appears that Major's biting incidents were minimized, as have Commander's more recently, while he was in the White House:

President Biden’s German shepherd Major attacked many more people than the White House has disclosed, according to newly released emails.

The documents indicate that Major bit members of the Secret Service eight days in a row in early March — though only one such incident was publicly acknowledged.

At least one White House visitor also was bitten in early March, according to the emails, which were released Thursday by the conservative transparency group Judicial Watch, which slammed the “cover-up” of the incidents.

. . . Major and Biden’s elderly and since-deceased dog Champ were whisked back to Delaware around March 9 for what the White House claimed was a prearranged visit with family friends.

. . . But emails among Secret Service employees indicated the dogs were returned to Delaware due to a spree of attacks.

Judicial Watch, which had sued for records involving Major's biting incidents, is back on the case with Commander:

Judicial Watch announced today [October 6] that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Secret Service for records regarding incidents of aggression and bites involving President Joe Biden’s Dog, Commander (Judicial Watch Inc, v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security (No. 1:23-cv-02960)).

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the Secret Service (a component of the Department of Homeland Security) failed to respond to a July 31, 2023, request for all records involving the “Biden family dog, ‘Commander,’ including but not limited to communications sent to and from [Secret Service] officials in the Uniformed and Non-Uniformed Divisions involved in White House operations and the Presidential Protection Division.”

. . . The dog reportedly has been removed from the White House after its most recent attack on a Secret Service agent and other White House staff. According to a Judicial Watch source, President Biden has mistreated his dogs. Judicial Watch has learned he has punched and kicked his dogs.

“It is beyond belief that, even after Judicial Watch exposed their attacking 10 Secret Service personnel, Joe and Jill Biden have continued to let their dog menace and attack Secret Service and White House staff. Let’s be blunt: the dangerous dog could kill someone,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The ongoing Biden administration cover-up of the Biden dog attacks on Secret Service agents is dangerous corruption.”

The White House apparently has a different spin. According to the UK Daily Mail, although Commander, like Major before, is now out of the White House,

White House staffers have blamed President Joe Biden's dog Commander's biting problems on the unfriendly expressions of Secret Service agents.

The 2-year-old German Shepherd reportedly had his 11th bite of one of the president's key protectors just last week - but is said to be pleasant around West Wing staff.

Secret Service emails obtained by Judicial Watch in July revealed the dog had bitten or threatened at least 10 people, making this the 11th incident involving it.

. . . In the batch of emails released in July, Secret Service officers called the dog 'freaking crazy,' argued he would have been 'put down' if he didn't belong to the Biden family and said he needed a muzzle.

On November 10, 2022, Jill Biden 'couldn't regain control' of Commander as the dog charged another member of the Secret Service.

My own take is this is not a normal relationship between a family and its dogs.