The Iranian-Influence Scandal
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/09/team-bidens-iranian-influence-scandal/
The Biden administration’s now-sidelined Iran envoy Robert Malley compromised America’s national security, and new bombshell reporting about an Iranian-influence operation proves it.
In the wake of news earlier this year that Malley is under FBI investigation and has been suspended from his State Department role, Team Biden has shielded him from scrutiny by the media and Congress. That’s an increasingly untenable position, and has been a disgrace since news of the Malley probe first broke.
Now, according to reports that ran in Semafor and Iran International on Tuesday, some of his acolytes are linked to a pro–Iranian regime echo chamber. It’s not clear if this is what triggered the Malley suspension, but this is more evidence of how unfit he was for the job in the first place.
Emails that the outlets obtained show that Iranian government officials internally claimed credit for cultivating a network of Western scholars whom the country’s foreign ministry leaned on to promote its message internationally during its nuclear negotiations with the Obama administration. The program was called the Iran Experts Initiative.
The IEI members allegedly laundered the regime’s talking points, publishing op-eds, giving interviews with news outlets, and seeking the input of regime officials on their public engagements.
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But wait! There's more!
Iranian Spies Have Infiltrated the American Government, Lawmakers Warn
The Iranian government has infiltrated the Biden administration and obtained access to sensitive U.S. government information, according to a coalition of Republican lawmakers who are investigating the matter.
Iran has repeatedly demonstrated in the past several months that it has access "to restricted U.S. State Department emails or government servers," according to a letter sent Wednesday to the White House by congressional Republicans and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
The series of leaks, which have appeared in Iranian state-controlled propaganda outlets, "constitute a significant security breach of U.S. government property by a foreign adversary" and could indicate there is a mole inside the Biden administration, according to Reps. Kevin Hern (R., Okla.) and Joe Wilson (R., S.C.) and Sen. Bill Hagerty (R., Tenn.). The probe is being handled by the Republican Study Committee, Congress's largest Republican caucus, and could force the Biden administration into admitting Iran has breached sensitive U.S. networks...
Both leaks, the lawmakers write, have the hallmarks of an Iranian intelligence operation and "may indicate that [the] Islamic Republic's intelligence apparatus has been able somehow to obtain access to restricted U.S. State Department emails." Access to these networks is closely controlled, meaning that Iran either hacked the system or was passed the information by a human source.
"This could mean that U.S. government employees leaked restricted and sensitive government documents," according to the lawmakers. "Either possibility is gravely concerning."
The lawmakers also express anger at the Biden administration for ignoring "repeated congressional inquiries into the circumstances that led to the suspension of Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley's security clearance." Members of Congress, they say, "have obtained more information from the pages of the Tehran Times than from U.S. government briefings."
"It is shocking that the Tehran Times, a propaganda arm of Iran's terror-sponsoring regime, somehow obtained sensitive internal State Department documents about the suspension of Special Envoy Rob Malley's security clearance," Hagerty told the Free Beacon. "The Biden administration must explain how this happened, especially after recent news reports about how current administration officials and those close to them were directly involved in the so-called Iran Experts Initiative, an Iranian regime-run foreign influence network that operated in the United States and around the world."
Hagerty and his RSC colleagues are asking the White House to verify if the repeated leaks are authentic and "describe the steps your administration is taking to prevent further leaks of information to the Iranian regime."
