The Biden administration’s former special envoy to Iran, who was placed on leave earlier this year for allegedly mishandling classified material, should face “extensive scrutiny” for his “permissive” stance toward the Tehran regime after it aided Hamas and Hezbollah in carrying out terrorist attacks against Israel, critics said Monday.
“Rob Malley deserves extensive scrutiny — yesterday, today and tomorrow,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) told The Post after the Wall Street Journal reported that officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps planned and signed off on this weekend’s atrocity that killed at least 900.
“These reports could not be more concerning, and they hint at what could be the worst State Department scandal since Alger Hiss,” Issa added.
“Malley and others created an incredibly permissive environment for Hamas, for Iran, to do all these things,” added Gabriel Noronha, a former special adviser on Iran at the State Department.
Noronha, who served under former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, 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.”
A senior House Republican aide told The Post that the cash influx followed an even more generous payout of $1.7 billion that the Obama administration made to Iran in 2016, eventually contributing to Saturday’s attack that triggered the Jewish state’s first declaration of war in 50 years.
“There is a straight line from Obama’s giveaway to Iran, to Biden’s enriching of Iran — to Iran’s war on Israel,” the aide said.
Noronha also noted the Biden administration had allowed for “an enormous deterrence failure” by undertaking just four operations against Iran-backed terror groups after allowing the regime and its proxies to carry out 83 attacks of their own against US forces.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had revealed the muted US response to Iran-backed attacks in Senate testimony earlier this year.
On Saturday, Hamas terrorists launched the largest-scale offensive against Israel since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, firing thousands of rockets into the Jewish state and engaging in a multi-front armed invasion to kill and capture civilians.
At least 900 Israelis have been killed, thousands wounded and approximately 150 taken hostage.
The death toll includes 11 Americans, with President Biden admitting Monday afternoon that US citizens were “likely” among those kidnapped and held in Gaza.
Noronha pointed out that under the Trump administration, the US did not distinguish “between the Iranian regime killing Americans and the regime’s proxies, including Hamas and Hezbollah, killing Americans.”
“Either way, we would treat that as attacks by the Iranian government itself — and respond accordingly,” he said. “So now, [11] Americans, at least, are dead. Maybe a dozen-plus are being held hostage.
“There is a temptation by this administration — and they’ve been very clear — they’ve been trying to pretend this isn’t their problem,” Noronha concluded. “And the reason they’re doing that is because they don’t want their Iran policy to get screwed.”
Malley was quietly placed on unpaid leave in June for his handling of “protected material,” but the State Department has refrained from sharing the nature of the allegations with Congress.
In August, an Iranian media outlet leaked a memo from Erin Smart, director of the Office of Personnel Security and Suitability in the department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, outlining “serious security concerns” with his actions.
The FBI has an “ongoing” investigation into the matter, according to the State Department.
Last month, another trove of leaked files revealed that three top aides to Malley were tied to a secretive influence operation by Tehran’s Foreign Ministry, according to internal Iranian government correspondence and emails reviewed by Semafor.
Noronha called the allegations against Malley “deeply troubling” but said details were scarce about his alleged breaches of US security protocols.
Defense hawks have also criticized Malley, who served an adviser on Iran policy under former President Barack Obama, for recently surfaced remarks in support of Hamas and Hezbollah.
“It’s a mistake to only think of them in terms of their terrorist violence dimension,” Malley said in a 2008 interview. “It has a charity organization, a social branch; it’s not something you can defeat militarily either and people need to understand that.”
“There’s so much misinformation about them,” Malley went on. “None of them are crazies. They may do things that we consider to belong to a different realm of rationality, but within their own system it’s often very logical.”
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“If Hamas is not allowed to govern, if we squeeze them, and you know you may have good reason for doing that, but if you do that, we’ll tell you what the reaction will be — rockets. No doubt,” he added. “And consolidation of Hamas’ power in Gaza. Both things have happened.”
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slammed Malley for the remarks, which resurfaced in May 2021 on X, formerly Twitter.
“Iran, a Hamas supporter, said it ‘stands behind the Palestinian struggle,’” Pompeo posted at the time. “Hamas is a terrorist organization, not a ‘charity.’ America’s negotiators must view them both as enemies — not socialites.”
Omri Ceren, a national security adviser to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), also posted Sunday that “Malley was so entangled with Hamas that Obama had to drop him as an advisor [sic] during the 2008 campaign — before later bringing him back to do Mideast policy.”
“During Biden he oversaw policy allowing Iran to get within reach of nukes and make $100s of billions,” Ceren said, linking to a Times of Israel article about Malley being cut from Obama’s first presidential campaign.
On Monday, after the White House insisted it had not seen evidence that Iran was behind the weekend carnage in Israel, Ceren tweeted: “Team Biden again behaving as Iran’s lawyer.”
