Robert Malley worked for the Clinton administration’s National Security Council and was included on high-level meetings with former Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, the father of modern terrorism (above right, with, from right, Malley, Palestinian negotiator Nabi Abu Rudineh and Bill Clinton). Getty Images
Robert Malley — the State Department bureaucrat and Biden's 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.” Many members of his negotiating team have resigned due to his seemingly inexplicable "excessive concessions to Iran." The Biden-Malley team also at one point turned to the Russians to negotiate with the Iranians on behalf of the United States after the Russians had invaded Ukraine..
Malley once tried to normalize relations with Hamas, the Iran-backed terrorist group which savagely massacred some 1,400 Israelis and at least 27 Americans this week. This is despite the fact that Hamas' Charter calls for the annihilation of Israel and the murder of all Jews.
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.”
Iran is a major financier of Hamas and also provides the neo-Nazi, Isis-like surrogate with weapons and training. Hamas' leaders visited the leaders of Iran several times over the past summer. They also met with Iranian high officials in Qatar on 10/14 where they discussed the terror proxy's barbaric and depraved massacre in Israel on 10/7 "and agreed to continue cooperation" to achieve the group's goals. Notwithstanding the obvious the Biden Administration refuses to acknowledge Iran's obvious involvement in the atrocities of 10/7.
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, quite ironically, stated its purpose was "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 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.
Alinejad added that 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.
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.
Malley's father Simon 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 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, Malley 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 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.
“@Rob_Malley continue to meet & work with Islamic Republic apologists who by any means want to get money in the hands of Iran’s terrorist regime! Who is this Senior White House official? Why haven’t they met with any Iranian American’s who aren’t pro-regime lobbyists?” said one tweet in June.
“YOU sir, are the reason this regime takes hostages,” said another, following the release of five American hostages in Iran in exchange for $6 billion — a controversial deal Malley helped broker. “They know they can count on you to negotiate with them&give them billions of $$ to release some selected ones; yet you leave behind Jamshidi Sharmahd who is sentenced to execution #IranRansomDeal.”
Malley did not return The Post’s requests for comment this week.