Robert Malley

Robert Malley

Robert Malley teaches at the Yale Jackson School of International Affairs at Yale University. As of October 15, 2023, Robert Malley is on leave from his post under Joe Biden as Iran special envoy for allegedly mishandling classified information. Robert Malley is the son of the late Simon Malley and Barbara Silverstein.

About

Robert Malley is the son of the late Simon Malley and Barbara Malley. Simon Malley was a founder or cofounder of one of the three Egyptian Communist parties formed in Egypt about 1948. Later he took the family to France where he edited/published a Marxist propaganda paper "L'Asia & "L'Afrique" (an approximate title). Eventually Simon and his family were ousted from France as national security threats.

Robert Malley’s parents were rabidly anti-Israel and counted Yasser Arafat as a personal friend. Indeed, Arafat was among those “leaders” (for want of a better word) who intervened with the French government to readmit the Malley family to France after they had been expelled for their radical activities.

That is, while in the Clinton administration Robert Malley dealt directly with Palestinian matters, and with Yasser Arafat himself, despite having a huge and hidden conflict of interest: close ties between his family and Yasser Arafat.

Well, hidden from the public – when questioned about it in 2001, Dennis Ross, Bill Clinton’s senior Middle East adviser, said that the Clinton administration knew all about Robert Malley’s past.

Downloaded Documents Accessed by 'Hostile Cyber Actor'

Excerpt from a New York Post article titled "Biden Iran envoy put classified documents on hacked personal email, phone: GOP lawmakers" dated May 7, 2024:

"Republicans lawmakers have uncovered “troubling allegations” that President Biden’s suspended special envoy to Iran, Robert Malley, stored classified material on his personal email account and cellphone — which was later accessed by a “hostile cyber actor.”

The top Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs committee on Monday asked the State Department to confirm the allegations against Malley, who was quietly placed on unpaid leave last June and had his security clearance suspended amid a State Department investigation reportedly centered on his potential mishandling of classified information.

The State Department has refused to reveal the exact nature of the allegations against Malley, leading Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking member James Risch (R-Idaho) and House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) to launch their own investigation into Biden’s top diplomat for Iran.

[...]

"'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,' they added.

The lawmakers asked Blinken to provide more information about the amount of documents Malley allegedly had on personal devices and their level of classification.

They also wanted to know whether Malley tried to send the classified material to anyone without a security clearance and whether Iran was responsible for the alleged hack, among several other queries related to the State Department and FBI’s ongoing investigation into the matter.

“The allegations we have been privy to are extremely troubling and demand immediate answers,” Risch and McCaul wrote.

“These allegations have substantial impact on our national security and people should be held accountable swiftly and strongly,” they added.

A State Department spokesperson told The Post Tuesday that Malley remains on leave and that the department has provided Congress with information on personnel inquiries related to Iran policy.

The spokesperson did not comment on the specific allegations uncovered by Risch and McCaul.

In 2015, the FBI opened a criminal investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for conduct similar to the allegations against Malley.

Clinton was found to have stored tens of thousands of emails from her time at the State Department on several different unsecured private servers – including 81 email chains that discussed classified information and seven that referred to classified material determined to be at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level.

The FBI determined that Clinton was “extremely careless” and that hostile actors may have gained access to her personal email account but did not charge her with a crime.

On leave for allegedly mishandling classified information

Simon Malley was discussed in an article about his son Robert Malley in the New York Post on Oct 14, 2023:

Robert Malley — the State Department bureaucrat and former Iran special envoy who is mysteriously on leave for allegedly mishandling classified information — grew up with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat as his unofficial “godfather” and once wrote that the Israeli treatment of Arabs was “shameful.”

Malley is under probe, along with members of his Iran negotiating team, by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability for allegedly “compromising ties to the Iranian regime.”

He once tried to normalize relations with Hamas, the Iran-backed terrorist group which massacred some 1,200 Israelis and at least 27 Americans this week.

The 60-year-old was suspended under a cloud of secrecy by the State Department in June.

At the time, he confirmed that his security clearance was being investigated and that he was confident about a positive outcome, according to a statement he provided to Fox News.

“I have been informed that my security clearance is under review,” he told the outlet. “I have not been provided any further information, but I expect the investigation to be resolved favorably and soon. In the meantime, I am on leave.”

But that might take a while longer with mounting speculation that Iran financed and helped coordinate the recent attacks on Israel.

“He compromised classified information, we think with Iran, and now there’s a wider investigation into this,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said on Fox News Thursday.

Although Secretary of State Antony Blinken said there is no “direct evidence” that Iran was behind the attacks on Israeli citizens, he did acknowledge that “Iran has had a long relationship with Hamas” in an interview with NBC Thursday.

“Hamas wouldn’t be Hamas without the support over many, many years from Iran,” Antony Blinken said. “And so, we know that. We see that. When it comes to this specific attack, in this moment, we don’t have direct evidence that Iran was involved in the attack, either in planning it or carrying it out.”

Robert Malley, who served as the Biden administration’s special envoy for Iran since Jan. 2021, is now teaching at the Yale Jackson School of International Affairs at Yale University.

Before that, he served as president and CEO of the George Soros-backed International Crisis Group, a non-profit that works to prevent wars, according to its website.

In his capacity as a Middle Eastern analyst, he has regularly spoken with Hamas, and tried to normalize the US’ relationship with Iran — a situation that has earned him the moniker “Mullah Malley” among his many detractors in the Iranian opposition.

Brooklyn-based Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad began a petition last year to convince the State Department to remove Robert Malley as Iran envoy.

“Now, we respectfully ask President Biden to appoint a new Special Envoy that the people in the US and in Iran can trust and respect as a symbol of America’s commitment to freedom and democracy,” she wrote.

Masih Alinejad added that Robert Malley had “minimized” widespread Iranian protests that broke out after the death of Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody after she was arrested for not wearing her hijab in a proper way. The petition has so far gathered more than 136,000 signatures.

Robert Malley is no stranger to controversy, and has followed in the footsteps of his father — an Egyptian-born Jew and Arab nationalist journalist who dedicated his life to anti-Israel causes and the developing world.

Simon Malley embraced national liberation movements around the world, and was a trusted confidant to Arafat and former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, with whom he once conducted a 20-hour interview, according to reports.

In 1969, after covering the United Nations for the Egyptian newspaper Al Goumhourya, Simon Malley moved his family to Paris to launch Afrique Asie — a journal that focused on newly independent states such as Egypt and Algeria and gave a voice to liberation movements around the world.

The journal embraced campaigns that disrupted France’s influence in Africa. It was banned in several African countries for supporting radical movements against King Hassan II in Morocco and dictator Mobuto Sese-Seko in Zaire, among others.

Malley, along with his brother Richard and sister Nadia, attended the posh École Jeannine Manuel, a bilingual school in Paris where his future boss Blinken was a classmate.

The Malley family’s sojourn in Paris was interrupted when conservative French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing ordered Simon out of the country and stripped him of his residence permit in 1980.

The expulsion came shortly after Interior Minister Christian Bonnet told the country’s National Assembly that articles written by Simon “were genuine appeals to murder foreign heads of state. The French government cannot tolerate this.”

French authorities put Simon on a plane to New York City, the hometown of his wife Barbara Silverstein, who had worked with the United Nations delegation of the Algerian National Liberation Front, or FLN.

Upon arrival in New York, Simon immediately boarded a plane to Switzerland where he spent eight months editing his newsletter before returning to France after the election of Francois Mitterand in 1981.

(Arafat, who Malley has written his father “felt close to,” may have intervened with the French government to help the family get back into the country.)

By that time, Robert was on his way to Yale University where he wrote for the student newspaper.

“There is a lot to be said about the Israeli treatment of Arabs — shameful on the part of a people who suffered more than any other from the injustices and horrors of racism,” he wrote in one piece. “And the fact must be faced that the resort to violence by the Palestinians is the inevitable corollary of the violence done to them.”

After his studies at Yale, Malley enrolled at Harvard Law School where Barack Obama was a classmate, and was later a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University.

Malley worked as a law clerk to Justice Byron R. White of the US Supreme Court between 1991 and 1992, and two years later joined the Clinton administration, working as part of the US National Security Council staff as Director for Democracy.

In 1996, he published a book, “The Call from Algeria: Third Worldism, Revolution and the Turn to Islam.” The next year, Malley became Executive Assistant to the National Security advisor, acting as an informal chief of staff for Samuel Berger, according to his bio on the Yale website.

In 2006, the year Simon died, Robert offered a solution to fix the problems in the Middle East in an op-ed for Time magazine. “Today the US does not talk to Iran, Syria, Hamas, the elected Palestinian government or Hezbollah,” he wrote. “The result has been a policy with all the appeal of a moral principle and all the effectiveness of a tired harangue.”

In 2008, Malley was forced to resign from the campaign of then-candidate Barack Obama after it was discovered that he was talking to officials in the Islamic Resistance Movement of Hamas — only to later return to the Obama administration as the senior director of the National Security Council and one of the main architects of the United States foreign policy in the Middle East.

“There’s so much misinformation about them,” Malley said about the Hamas leaders with whom he was in regular contact. “I speak to them, my colleagues speak to them, None of them are crazy, they have their own rationality. Within their own system … they’re very logical.”

Those comments, which resurfaced after the State Department put Malley on leave this summer, have generated a barrage of criticism on social media..."

One of Susan Rice's 'Most Trusted Advisers'

On March 06, 2015, The White House Office of the Press Secretary quoted Susan Rice as claiming that Robert Malley was one of her "most trusted advisors" in a press release:

"Today, National Security Adviser Susan E. Rice announced that Philip Gordon, Special Assistant to the President and White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf Region will be stepping down, and will be succeeded by Rob Malley, currently NSC Senior Director for Iran, Iraq, Syria and the Gulf States. Dr. Malley will assume his new position on April 6, 2015.

Ambassador Rice said, “For more than six years, Phil Gordon has been an indispensable member of the President’s foreign policy team, as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs from 2009-13 and as Middle East Coordinator since March 2013. At the National Security Council, Phil played a critical role on some of the most important and challenging issues facing this country, including the Iranian nuclear program; our strategic partnership with Israel; Middle East peace; Syria; Iraq; U.S. relations with the Gulf States; and the democratic transitions in Egypt and North Africa. I thank him for his service and wish him all the best as he departs the NSC to spend some well-deserved time with his family and pursue other professional endeavors.

There could be no better successor to Phil than Rob Malley, who is already one of my most trusted advisers and ideally placed to provide a seamless transition. One of our country’s most respected experts on the Middle East, since February 2014 Rob has played a critical role in forming our policy on Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the Gulf. I look forward to working with him in his new role.”

Rob Malley served as Executive Assistant to National Security Advisor Sandy Berger between 1996 and 1998. In October 1998, he was appointed Special Assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs, a post he held until the end of the administration in 2001. Between 2001 and 2014, he directed the Middle East Program at the International Crisis Group.

JStreet advisory council

In 2009, listed members of the JStreet advisory council included Robert Malley, Former Special Assistant to the President for Arab-Israeli Affairs