New Details Emerge in GOP Investigation of Biden’s Iran Diplomat

Top Republican members of Congress revealed this week that President Joe Biden’s special envoy to Iran, who is under federal criminal investigation, allegedly transferred classified material to his personal email and cellphone, at which point they were stolen by a hostile foreign actor.

The revelation about Robert Malley, Biden’s now-suspended special envoy to Iran, comes after a report published in Tablet Magazine last October said that he was linked to an “Iranian spy ring” that was operating to shift U.S. policy to favor the Islamic nation.

The FBI criminal investigation into Malley’s handling of classified material surfaced last summer after he was placed on leave without pay by the State Department.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member James Risch (R-ID) and House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) wrote a letter this week to Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressing their frustration with the Department’s “lack of responsiveness to our requests for information needed to conduct appropriate oversight.”

Included in the letter was the following revelation:

Specifically, we understand that Mr. Malley’s security clearance was suspended because he allegedly transferred classified documents to his personal email account and downloaded these documents to his personal cell phone. It is unclear to whom he intended to provide these documents, but it is believed that a hostile cyber actor was able to gain access to his email and/or phone and obtain the downloaded information.

Malley was accused in the Tablet report of advancing several operatives in the suspected Iranian spy ring, including helping an alleged Iranian asset named Ariane Tabatabai infiltrate her way into “some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. government,” including at the State Department and Pentagon.

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The operation began in 2014 when Iran created the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI), a propaganda and influence operation that recruited top talent from Iranians living abroad to help Iran obtain a favorable nuclear deal. The group reported to an official from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which is a terrorist organization, and Iran’s then-Foreign Minister Javad Zarif was also reportedly involved.

The report, headlined “High-Level Iranian Spy Ring Busted In Washington,” stated:

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.

Retired CIA analyst Peter Theroux, who was with the agency for 25 years, told the outlet, “I know what a spy network looks like.”

“This is how recruited assets speak to their handling officers,” he said. “There’s lots of the mood music around that correspondence saying, let me know what you need me to collect. It seems clear who’s the subordinate here — what you’d call responsive to tasking.”

Theroux noted that for someone like Tabatabai to receive even the most basic security clearance from the U.S. government, she would be so thoroughly examined that it would be impossible that the Biden administration did not know about her connections to Iran.

“The hoops you have to jump through to get a bare-bones top secret clearance even without compartments or special access programs are enormous,” he said. “They grill you on your foreign contacts. Contacts with any foreign government raise more red flags than Bernie Sanders’ honeymoon. Contacts with senior officials from enemy governments, classified as non-frat governments like Russia, China, Cuba, as well as Iran, are in a different category altogether — what would normally be totally disqualifying.”

McCaul suggested last summer Malley may have committed treason.

In January 2022, three U.S. officials working on the team negotiating with Iran left the group because Malley would not take a harder negotiating position regarding sanctions.

Noronha 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.”

Related: Biden Admin Official Allegedly Part Of ‘Covert Campaign’ To Undermine Iranian Opposition: Report