RUTHFULLY YOURS

American intelligence agencies have concluded that Iran was behind the recent hacking of the Trump campaign. In reporting that news, the New York Times adds the following (my italics):

Iran’s government has shown signs of becoming increasingly aggressive in recent months, because it sees the outcome of the elections as “particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests,” the [U.S. intelligence] officials said.

They did not specify which, if any, outcome Iran might favor. In 2018, Mr. Trump scrapped an agreement reached in the waning days of the Obama administration to limit and monitor Tehran’s civilian nuclear development program in exchange for easing economic sanctions.

But leading Democrats, including President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, have also taken a tough line with Iran, the chief sponsor of Hezbollah and Hamas.

According to the Times, then, it is not clear which American presidential candidate Iran might prefer to see prevail. That, we’re to believe, is because Biden and Harris — whose administration continues to insist that Iran only has a civilian nuclear program — have “taken a tough line with Iran,” which, after all, is “the chief sponsor of” two brutal anti-American terrorist organizations.

Down here on Planet Earth, however, Biden was vice president in the administration that put Iran on a glide path to nuclear weapons by inducing the jihadist regime’s agreement to a deal — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — that was so one-sidedly in Iran’s favor that the administration would not submit it to the Senate as a treaty. Because it would have had no chance of congressional approval (either under the Constitution’s treaty process or through enabling legislation), the Obama-Biden administration set about implementing it through the United Nations — where Iran’s two top anti-American allies, China and Russia, hold veto power on the Security Council.

Put aside for a moment the overarching Obama-Biden fiction that Iran, which doesn’t need civilian nuclear-power generation, had only a civilian nuclear program and was not pursuing nuclear weapons. One of other major congressional objections to the JCPOA was that it did not require Iran to refrain from sponsoring Hezbollah and Hamas. And at this very moment, of course, Democrats are terrified of offending the pro-Hamas agitators outside their convention in Chicago, while the Biden-Harris administration demands that Israel both agree to a cease-fire with Hamas and resist “escalating” against Hezbollah.

Another objection to the JCPOA was its heedlessness regarding Iran’s development of ballistic missiles. The Obama-Biden administration orchestrated the deal’s approval in conjunction with Security Council Resolution 2231 (2015), which, beginning eight years after the JCPOA’s 2015 effective date, ended restrictions on Iran’s ballistic-missile activity. That explicitly included canceling prohibitions on Iran’s development of “ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons.”

Hence, all restrictions on Iran’s missile activity ended in 2023. During the Obama-Harris administration, then, Iran has not only developed ballistic missiles but has transferred hundreds of them to Russia for its war of aggression against Ukraine — to say nothing of Tehran’s routine supplying of its terrorist proxies.

As I detailed in a column over the weekend, three weeks ago, after months of stonewalling, the Biden-Harris administration finally produced a statutorily required report from the administration’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) on Iran’s nuclear activities. After years of echoing the Obama-Biden administration delusion that Iran was not undertaking nuclear-weapons-development activities, ODNI has now acknowledged that the regime has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce” nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, in spinning this conclusion, ODNI hewed to the Biden-Harris position: “Iran does not have an active military nuclear program.” Sure.

When he was president, Trump carried out a maximum-pressure campaign that minimized Iran’s energy commerce, starving it of funds — including funds for the facilitation of terrorism. As commander in chief, Trump also approved a drone strike that killed Qassem Soleimani, the major general in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (a designated terrorist organization under U.S. law), which coordinated anti-American terrorist attacks. (During the 2020 campaign, Biden scolded Trump for “escalating” tensions with Iran by killing Soleimani.)

The Biden-Harris administration, in pleading unsuccessfully with Tehran to restore the JCPOA, reversed Trump’s maximum-pressure campaign. This has left the mullahs and the IRGC flush with tens of billions of dollars in oil revenue (this past spring, the Financial Times reported that Iranian oil exports had hit a six-year high). Iran uses those funds to back its terrorist proxies, which have targeted U.S. forces in the Middle East; the regime is also known to be conspiring to kill Trump and other former Trump-administration officials.

In the course of beseeching Iran to restore the JCPOA, Biden’s special Iran envoy, Robert Malley, has been suspended. He is under investigation for transferring classified intelligence to Iran. Initially, congressional Republicans learned that Malley may have transferred classified documents to his personal email address and cellphone, which may have resulted in their being obtained by a “hostile cyber actor.” More recently, the Washington Free Beacon reports, Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) and Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) have written that Malley is under FBI investigation for “passing classified intelligence to Tehran.” The Biden-Harris State Department has been mum regarding the details.

Malley has been linked to analysts who were reeled into an Iranian influence operation known as the “Iran Experts Initiative.” In this IEI, the Iranian foreign ministry recruited a pool of academics and researchers willing to advocate for the regime’s policy positions. One of them, Dina Esfandiary, was hired by the International Crisis Group, which Malley ran before joining the Biden-Harris State Department. Another, Ariane Tabatabai, worked as a Malley aide in talks with Iran until the Biden-Harris administration transferred her to the Pentagon as chief of staff to the assistant secretary of defense for special operations — a critical counterterrorism post that calls for a high security clearance.

The Beacon elaborates that, while Tabatabai was part of the Iran Experts Initiative, she co-wrote published articles with Phil Gordon — including one in March 2020 that said continued sanctions against Iran would create a “catastrophe” in the Middle East. Gordon is Vice President Harris’s national-security adviser; he would undoubtedly play a key policy role in a prospective Harris-Walz administration.

The mullahs are sure acting like the outcome of the U.S. election matters a great deal to them. But I suppose the Times is right: There’s really no way of telling which candidate the Iranians would prefer to see in the Oval Office come January.