It was the week when RFK Jr reminded everyone that he is mad, Donald Trump discovered that he is holding Israeli antiquities at Mar-a-Lago, and the State Department did its best to forget that Robert Malley, the Special Envoy to Iran, ever existed.
Four years ago, the Israel Antiquities Authority loaned a pair of ancient ceramic lamps for a Chanukah party at the White House.
They were apparently entrusted to Saul Fox, a serial donor to the Authority, and he was supposed to return them to Israel after the party.
Their current whereabouts are unknown. Perhaps they set the mood when Jared Kushner returns from a hard day’s hedge funding and runs a hot bath. With Dead Sea salts, of course.
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Robert Malley (Photo: Getty Images)
Or perhaps they’re in some of those boxes that Trump stacks in his chandeliered bathrooms at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, along with his dirty shirts, receipts for golf cart rentals and classified government documents.
No one knows the current whereabouts of Robert Malley, either. Malley was one of Barack Obama’s lead negotiators in the “Iran deal” of 2015.
He was also the lead negotiator in Joe Biden’s long-running attempt to revive the deal. Malley was the mind, if that is the word, behind a slow-motion fiasco.
The Americans offer ever greater concessions and the Iranians, not unreasonably, conclude that they can make ever greater demands.
A few weeks ago, it was rumoured in Washington that a new “deal” was imminent at last. It wasn’t a deal, really, so much as an “understanding”.
As the Iranians have long understood that the Americans are desperate, any “understanding” of this kind would amount to the terms of surrender.
And then, just as Malley’s hour of triumph dawned, he disappeared. Someone leaked to the press that the FBI were investigating him for multiple security breaches.
The State Department placed him on unpaid leave when the story broke, then refused to comment further.
It now seems that the State Department revoked Malley’s security clearance earlier this year, around the time that it said he was on leave for “personal reasons”.
The Congress committees that are supposed to have “oversight” of the government were not aware of Malley’s suspension until last month. Was the State Department trying to hush up something embarrassing?
This week, 17 Republican senators wrote to the State Department’s director-general Diana Shaw requesting “an independent investigation into whether State Department officials complied with all appropriate laws and regulations”.
The State Department has now scrubbed Malley’s picture and biography from its website. It is stonewalling a second probe into Malley’s activities, by the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
When the committee asked for information, the State Department invoked Malley’s privacy. Michael McCaul, the Republican chair, called this “absolutely unacceptable”, given that “nothing could be more serious” than the allegations against Malley.
What are the allegations? The State Department referred the Foreign Affairs Committee to the Foreign Affairs Manual, the users’ guide which instructs State Department employees on the right way of handling classified information.
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Antony Blinken (Photo: Getty Images)
Adam Kredo, the Washington Free Beacon reporter who is pursuing Malley’s disappearing trail, notes that Malley “has a history of going off the rails in his diplomatic efforts”. In 2008, he was fired from the Obama campaign after unauthorised contact with Hamas.
With whom was Malley allegedly sharing classified information? The Tehran Times is a pro-regime Iranian paper with links to Iran’s foreign ministry. It is to political reportage as RFK Jr is to medical research. And that is why its line on Malley is interesting.
Malley, the Tehran Times claims, was in contact with Iran’s ambassador to the UN, Saeid Iravani, and three Iranian Americans who served as “broker and middleman” for the regime in its talks with Washington: Vali Nasr, a professor at Johns Hopkins University; Ali Vaez, Malley’s former colleague at the Crisis Group; and Trita Parsi, who works with Malley’s son at the Quincy Institute think tank.
The Tehran Times claims that Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan knew all about Malley’s informal contacts.
Hence the effort to hush them up after someone tipped off the FBI and someone, possibly the same someone, leaked the story. Perhaps they just didn’t like Robert Malley. Or perhaps they don’t like the idea of the US folding to Iran.
