A new report prompts an interesting question: Who gets more access to Rob Malley, President Biden’s embattled Iran envoy, these days, members of Congress or Yale undergraduates? That the question needs to be asked at all is probably infuriating to the lawmakers who are tasked with conducting oversight of the State Department. The answer, worse.
Malley, the Biden administration’s point man on efforts to revive some version of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, was already one of the State Department’s most controversial figures when reporters learned last June that he had been quietly sidelined several weeks before. In April, reportedly, he had already been suspended when he was due to brief the Senate on Iran policy. His deputy showed up instead, and senators were told that he had a family matter to tend to. Subsequent reports revealed that he had been suspended amid an investigation into his security clearance and whether he had mishandled classified documents, and then, that the FBI was involved in probing the matter.
Even before October 7 brought an intense focus back to Iran’s malign efforts to support Hamas and other terrorist groups, Republicans on the hill were frustrated with State’s refusal to provide access to Malley, and answers about him. (“The Department’s failure to inform Congress of this matter demonstrates at best a lack of candor, and at worst represents deliberate and potentially unlawful misinformation,” Representative Mike McCaul, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote in a June 30 letter.) Instead, the administration has blessed an unusual arrangement whereby Malley has undertaken teaching roles at Yale and Princeton during the investigation into his clearance.
On Friday, the Yale Daily News reported on the details of the latest development in this arrangement: Malley is in the process of selecting students — interviewing them — for a course that he will teach this semester called “Contending with Israel-Palestine.” From the report, it sounds like a small, seminar-style course on the political situation. Malley explained in an interview with the Yale Daily News that after October 7, “I concluded, in coordination with the School, that it had become even more important to try to create an environment where students could learn more about this topic and engage with others in thoughtful, respectful conversations.”
In addition to readings by Israeli and Palestinian figures, Malley, who was fired from President Obama’s first presidential campaign after making conciliatory comments about Hamas, has apparently also assigned a reading by John Mearsheimer, co-author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
Malley, though suspended, is still listed as Iran envoy on the State Department’s website. It’s not unusual for a prominent official to end up with teaching perch at a university after leaving government, but it is highly unusual for such an official to land one during an apparent investigation into his conduct. If they wanted to, Malley’s handpicked students could ask him the questions that the members of Congress can’t. Beyond his clearance, and the substance of his effort to negotiate an agreement with Iran, one glaring subject to ask about is his contact with individuals involved in the Iran Experts Initiative, an Iranian foreign-ministry program that cultivated relationships with academics in Malley’s orbit.
The access granted to his students contrasts sharply with the lack of access granted to lawmakers tasked with conducting oversight. It also calls attention to the fact that House Republicans have declined to compel Malley to testify before their committees since the latest controversies broke. The administration is doing its best to defend him, but Congress isn’t exactly making its best effort to get to the bottom of things. That’s why this controversy continues to roll along without much of a resolution or any definitive fact-finding.