A “high-level Iranian spy ring” has been “busted in Washington,” reports Tablet Magazine. “A top Biden/Obama admin official was essentially operating an Iranian spy ring,” notes Jason Bedrick of the Heritage Foundation. As law professor David Bernstein points out, “There is an ongoing, breaking espionage scandal involving Iranian agents of influence penetrating the highest levels of US government, and the MSM is expressing only passing interest… This should be huge news.”
Tablet Magazine reports:
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.
On Thursday, 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.”
The emails, which were exchanged over a period of several years between Iranian regime diplomats and analysts, show that Tabatabai was part of a regime propaganda unit set up in 2014 by the Iranian Foreign Ministry. The Iran Experts Initiative (IEI) tasked operatives drawn from Iranian diaspora communities to promote Iranian interests during the clerical regime’s negotiations with the United States over its nuclear weapons program. Though several of the IEI operatives and others named in the emails have sought to portray themselves on social media as having engaged with the regime in their capacity as academic experts, or in order to promote better understanding between the United States and Iran, none has questioned the veracity of the emails.
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.
As Professor Bernstein observes, “The fact that Robert Malley could get anywhere near the levers of power … given his background and expressed views is a sign of severe rot in the American establishment.” As a lawyer notes, “Rob Malley, the rabid pro-Iran installment of the Biden administration, was an Iranian spy. That this isn’t the biggest story in foreign policy world is insane.”
Earlier, the Biden administration paid Iran a $6 billion ransom in exchange for 5 U.S. hostages being released from prison. That works out to $1.2 billion each. As former State Department official Gabriel Noronha points out, “Three years ago,” an Iranianian official “said they could balance their budget by getting a billion each for American hostages. Well, Biden just gave Iran $1.2 billion each for five.”
The Washington Free Beacon reports:
An alleged member of a secret Iranian government influence network visited the Biden White House at least five times for high-level meetings with senior U.S. officials, according to visitor logs.
Ali Vaez, an Iran analyst with the International Crisis Group, was outed last week as an alleged member of a vast Iranian-government-controlled propaganda network that helped push Tehran’s talking points in Washington, D.C., and influence policy, according to Semafor. Vaez reportedly communicated with senior Iranian government associates as part of the Iran Experts Initiative, an influence operation run by Iran’s foreign ministry.
The meetings are raising questions about whether the Biden administration was aware of Vaez’s alleged participation in the Iranian influence operation and may have given him insider information about the administration’s diplomacy with Tehran. Another alleged member of the Iran Experts Initiative, Ariane Tabatabai, serves as a senior Pentagon official and holds a security clearance, prompting Republican lawmakers to demand her top secret access be revoked.
Vaez is a close associate of U.S. Iran envoy Robert Malley, who was removed from his post earlier this year and stripped of his security clearance amid an investigation into his alleged mishandling of classified information.
Vaez took at least five meetings at the White House between 2022 and 2023, as the Biden administration was engaged in diplomacy with Iran that resulted in a hostage deal last month that freed up some $6 billion in revenue for the hardline regime.
