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Their true allegiance is to Iran, but they hold security clearances in highly-placed posts in Biden’s administration — is that a problem?
According to multiple news reports, including one by Semaphore, there was an intelligence op initiated by Iran to rehabilitate its country’s image on the world stage. An op that went all the way up to the Pentagon’s ‘chief of staff for the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations’.
The op goes back to the Obama days when Ben Rhodes was bragging about how the press could easily be manipulated as an ‘echo chamber’ to parrot Democrat talking points, especially with respect to Iran.
It’s looking like Iran was playing exactly the same game with credulous Democrats in America who were excited about cooperating with Iran that Democrats thought THEY were playing with Americans.
This quote gives a basic sense of the broad strokes.
“In the spring of 2014, senior Iranian Foreign Ministry officials initiated a quiet effort to bolster Tehran’s image and positions on global security issues — particularly its nuclear program — by building ties with a network of influential overseas academics and researchers. They called it the Iran Experts Initiative…
The officials, working under the moderate President Hassan Rouhani, congratulated themselves on the impact of the initiative: At least three of the people on the Foreign Ministry’s list were, or became, top aides to Robert Malley, the Biden administration’s special envoy on Iran, who was placed on leave this June following the suspension of his security clearance.” — Semafor (Tues)
Yesterday’s story about Iranian plants operating at some of the highest levels of the Biden administration has led to a follow-up story today in which the GOP is calling for answers.
The Republican chairmen of the House Armed Services Committee and House Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations jointly wrote Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin Tuesday, in response to the report, and requested a review of the security clearance approved for Ariane Tabatabai, the Pentagon official described in the Iranian documents as being part of the IEI. Tabatabai is a leading academic on Iran and brought into the Biden administration by Malley in 2021 to be part of his nuclear negotiating team with Tehran.
“Was the Department aware of Ms. Tabatabai’s participation in Iranian government-sponsored influence networks, such as the Iran Experts Initiative?” Reps. Mike Rogers and Jack Bergman wrote. They requested the Pentagon answer this question, and six others, by next Tuesday.
Sen. Ted Cruz, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, demanded the administration suspend the security clearances of any U.S. official tied to the IEI. He also called on the White House to refrain from resuming nuclear negotiations with Tehran, given the information about the IEI initiative.
“Americans have rightly been asking why the Biden administration is so friendly with the Iranian regime, and why Biden administration officials have so single-mindedly enabled Iranian nuclear progress and terrorism,” Cruz wrote. “These reports and emails suggest a vast Iranian influence operation that goes to the very top of the administration.”
The messages cited in Semafor’s story about the IEI covered a period in the mid-2010s when the Obama administration and Iran – under the more moderate President Hassan Rouhani – were negotiating to constrain Tehran’s nuclear program; it’s unclear if the IEI, which was set up by Rouhani’s Foreign Ministry, continues to function since the 2021 election of Ebrahim Raisi, who’s been sanctioned by the U.S. for human rights abuses. — Semafor (Wed)
What ‘highest levels’ of government did these people work for?
The communications reveal the access Rouhani’s diplomats have had to Washington’s and Europe’s policy circles, particularly during the final years of the Obama administration, through this network. One of the German academics in the IEI, according to the emails, offered to ghostwrite op-eds for officials in Tehran. Others would, at times, seek advice from the Foreign Ministry’s staff about attending conferences and hearings in the U.S. and Israel. The IEI participants were prolific writers of op-eds and analyses, and provided insights on television and Twitter, regularly touting the need for a compromise with Tehran on the nuclear issue — a position in line with both the Obama and Rouhani administrations at the time. The emails describe the IEI being initiated following Rouhani’s 2013 election, when he was looking to find an accommodation with the West on the nuclear issue. According to the emails, Iran’s Foreign Ministry, through its in-house think tank — the Institute for Political and International Studies — reached out to ten “core” members for the project, through which it planned to liaise over the next 18 months to aggressively promote the merits of a nuclear deal between Tehran and Washington, which was finalized in July 2015.
“This initiative which we call ‘Iran Experts Initiative (IEI)’ is consisted of a core group of 6-10 distinguished second-generation Iranians who have established affiliations with the leading international think-tanks and academic institutions, mainly in Europe and the US,” Saeed Khatibzadeh, a Berlin-based Iranian diplomat and future Foreign Ministry spokesman, wrote to Mostafa Zahrani, the head of the IPIS think tank in Tehran, on March 5, 2014, as the project gained steam. Their communication veered between English and Farsi — which was translated by Iran International and independently verified by Semafor.
[…]
Tabatabai currently serves in the Pentagon as the chief of staff for the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, a position that requires a U.S. government security clearance. She previously served as a diplomat on Malley’s Iran nuclear negotiating team after the Biden administration took office in 2021. Esfandiary is a senior advisor on the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group, a think tank that Malley headed from 2018-2021. — Semafor (Tues)
There is even more to this story that many conservatives haven’t considered the relevance of…
Biden, Kerry and other holdovers from the Obama administration were all-in on Iran, to the point of shelving our own legitimate domestic priorities in order to advance the Iran policies.
Do we still remember the stand-down order the Obama administration gave to criminal cartels that were doing business in America rather than rattle Iran’s cages? What about Hezbollah? What about the #2 terrorist that never got arrested?
Remember the Project Cassandra scandal that was quietly swept under the rug amidst all the Trump Resistance Russia-Russia-Russia nonsense?
- BOMB PLOT: Mattis Blasts Obama For Ignoring Iranian Threat To US Soil
- Obama Loves Our Enemies: Damning New 411 Emerges About Obama & Hezbollah That’ll Blow Your Socks Off
- Hey CNN: Obama Put Politics Ahead Of Disrupting The Empire Of World’s 2nd Most Wanted Terrorist … Is That News?
- UNCOVERED! Obama Hampered Law Enforcement Investigation of Iranian Terrorism Funding
- Dear CNN: Obama Quietly Helped Iran Skirt Financial Sanctions – Is That ‘News?’
As you read this list, keep in mind that China, Russia and Iran are becoming closely-aligned allies, including Iran giving direct aid to Russia’s side of war effort in Ukraine.
More recently, Iran has seen the release of $6B in frozen assets as part of Joe Biden’s recent prisoners-for-ransom deal that definitely was NOT a ransom deal rivaling Obama’s own pallets of cash deal that was ‘almost certainly used to fund’ terrorist acts once they had the money in hand.
Iran is said to be on the precipice of being able to build 10 nuclear weapons… and this group was explicitly angling to green-light their own nuclear ambitions.
Seeing as they routinely chant Death To America and Death To Israel, you might expect our ‘intelligent experts’ might know better than to put more money into the hands of the world’s leading state financier of terror groups.
Then again, Iran was the one country whose ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings Barack Obama explicitly refused to endorse.
It’s almost enough to make you wonder whether Valeri Jarrett’s close connections to Obama were such an innocent coincidence, isn’t it?
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