The Patriot Post® · Robert Malley: Iran's Man in DC

Last night, in an appearance on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Joe Biden was asked whether Iran was behind the barbaric Hamas attack in which more than 1,200 Israeli civilians and 27 Americans were murdered, and 199 others were taken hostage.

“I don’t wanna get into classified information,” said Biden. “But to be very blunt with you, there is no clear evidence of that.”

No clear evidence, eh? Perhaps no one in the Biden administration reads The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal. “The Palestinian militants behind the surprise weekend attack on Israel began planning the assault at least a year ago,” reported the Post last week, “with key support from Iranian allies who provided military training and logistical help as well as tens of millions of dollars for weapons, current and former Western and Middle Eastern intelligence officials said Monday.”

As for The Journal, its headline read, “Iran Helped Plot Attack on Israel Over Several Weeks.”

We wonder: What part of “with key support from Iranian allies” does Joe Biden not understand? What part of “Iran helped plot attack” is unclear?

Still, it’s easy to see why this president would try to downplay Iran’s involvement in the attack — even lie about it — because his administration’s policy toward the world’s leading state-sponsor of terrorism has been one of rank and unrelenting appeasement. As Republican Senator Tom Cotton noted two days after the attack, “The Biden administration hasn’t acknowledged Iran’s involvement in Hamas’s terrorism because it would be an indictment of the administration’s disastrous concessions to Iran.”

Indeed, when Biden finally spoke about the attack last Tuesday, the word “Iran” was nowhere to be found among the 1,300 words in his speech.

Perhaps the key to all this obfuscation is a little-known Biden administration official named Robert Malley, who’s been instrumental in formulating our nation’s Iran policy — and not just for Team Biden, but going all the way back to the Clinton administration and including Barack Obama’s disastrous nuke deal, which Donald Trump rightly tore up but which Joe Biden has been feverishly trying to recreate.

“The State Department,” reports the Washington Free Beacon, “is under pressure to provide Congress with information on its investigation into U.S. Iran envoy Robert Malley, who was suspended from his post earlier this year amid an FBI investigation into allegations he mishandled classified information.”

Malley, it seems, has become far too cozy with the Iranians. And perhaps that’s to be expected from a guy who, as the New York Post reports, “grew up with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat as his unofficial ‘godfather’ and once wrote that the Israeli treatment of Arabs was ‘shameful.’”

As the Post continues: “In 2008, Malley was forced to resign from the campaign of then-candidate Barack Obama after it was discovered that he was talking to officials in the Islamic Resistance Movement of Hamas — only to later return to the Obama administration as the senior director of the National Security Council and one of the main architects of the United States foreign policy in the Middle East.”

So, in addition to being an Iran sympathizer, Malley is also a Hamas sympathizer. And this guy has been helping to formulate the Democrats’ Middle East policy for decades.

Investigative journalist Lee Smith has also been digging into the Malley affair. As he reports in Tablet:

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.

One sure way to attract attention is to get caught in a lie, and the Biden State Department did just that when it tried to quietly place Malley on leave back in June. First, the State Department said that Malley’s suspension wasn’t a suspension at all. When members of Congress first began asking about his absence, they were told Malley was on personal leave, perhaps due to a family illness. Uh-huh. A couple of months later, we learned that not only was he suspended, but his security clearance had been yanked due to mishandling of classified information.

How serious is the investigation? Serious enough to have been handed from the State Department to the FBI, which will determine whether it wants to pursue justice or make this matter disappear, like it tried to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop.

And serious enough to have attracted the attention of Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, the 90-year-old oversight pit bull and the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee. In a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Grassley pressed for some answers:

The State Department’s lack of transparency communicating on the status of Mr. Malley’s role is unacceptable. In May 2023, State Department officials told Congress that Mr. Malley was on “extended personal leave” and suggested that his absence might be related to a family health issue not any mishandling of classified information. Yet, State officials said they learned of Mr. Malley’s change in status from paid to unpaid leave shortly after questions about his status were raised at the State Department’s regular afternoon briefing in late June 2023.“

As we noted earlier, that "extended personal leave” line was a lie — and a pretty clear indicator that Team Biden is covering up a far more serious situation with Malley.

Grassley further noted that the State Department had quietly updated its X account for the Office of the Special Envoy of Iran to show a picture of Deputy Special Envoy Abram Paley rather than Malley, and that, at an August 14 State Department Press Briefing, when asked if the update meant that Malley had been fired, a spokesperson said, “I have no specifics to offer … [but] Abram Paley is leading the department’s work in [Iran].”

This is scandal, and our sense is that we’ve only scratched the surface. No wonder the Biden administration doesn’t want to talk about Iran.