How long has there been an Iranian spy ring operating within the Department of State under the watchful eye of President Joe Biden?
Apparently, since 2021, when Robert Malley, a now-former special envoy to Iran was hired by the Biden administration began feeding information back to Tehran through a network of spies operating inside and outside the United States. The goal was not merely intelligence gathering but also altering policy toward Iran and freeing up money for the regime.
As the New York Post reports, it’s being called the worst scandal in the history of the State Department:
The Biden administration’s former special envoy to Iran, who was placed on leave earlier this year for allegedly mishandling classified material, should face “extensive scrutiny” for his “permissive” stance toward the Tehran regime after it aided Hamas and Hezbollah in carrying out terrorist attacks against Israel, critics said Monday.
“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.
The investigation into Malley and others around him has grown more serious in light of the Hamas terror attack on Israel just days ago. Hamas is funded and propped up by Iran, the recipient of intelligence emanating from the State Department leak.
It gets worse, however, as it’s possible over the past two and half years of the Biden administration, billions of dollars have been funneled into Iran by Malley’s negotiating:
“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.
Noronha, who served under former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said Malley and his negotiating team “purposefully funneled billions of dollars to [Iran] through lack of sanctions enforcement and provision of sanctions relief that has given them somewhere between $50 [billion] and $80 billion over the last two and a half years.”
A senior House Republican aide told The Post that the cash influx followed an even more generous payout of $1.7 billion that the Obama administration made to Iran in 2016, eventually contributing to Saturday’s attack that triggered the Jewish state’s first declaration of war in 50 years.
“There is a straight line from Obama’s giveaway to Iran, to Biden’s enriching of Iran — to Iran’s war on Israel,” the aide said.
Treating Iran in any way other than an aggressive and hostile foreign actor bent on harming the United States and eliminating the state of Israel is the wrong move. However, that’s exactly what happened under the failed foreign policy of Joe Biden as he returned to Obama’s appeasement strategy. Furthermore, is it any wonder now why Malley and his underlings were arguing in favor of the United States re-joining the Iran nuclear deal? It’s a framework that entirely benefitted Iran, of course.
The question now is just how much Biden’s State Department leak and financial backing of Iran contributed directly to the Hamas attack on Israel.
Tablet Magazine provides a deeper dive into the issue and tries to untangle some of the webs associated with Malley’s time in the State Department:
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. The emails, which were reported on by veteran Wall Street Journal correspondent Jay Solomon, writing in Semafor, and by Iran International, the London-based émigré opposition outlet which is the most widely read independent news source inside Iran, were published last week after being extensively verified over a period of several months by the two outlets.
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.
It’s not just Malley but others, such as Ariane Tabatabai, who have been feeding information back to the Iranian regime. How none of these people were flagged during their onboarding is where the scandal lies.
The details of this breach are still unknown as the Tablet article just broke on October 1, days ahead of the Hamas attack on Israel.
Chalk it up to another notch on the belt of Joe Biden’s foreign policy expertise.
