What Happened Today: October 2, 2023

Newsom names Feinstein replacement; Gaetz V. McCarthy Redux; Marines short on camo

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The Big Story

After California Gov. Gavin Newsom selected prominent Democratic Party fundraiser Laphonza Butler to take over the Senate seat previously occupied by Dianne Feinstein, who died at the age of 90 on Thursday, critics across the political spectrum immediately began raising questions about the selection. Currently serving as the president of EMILYs List, an NGO that backs Democratic women running for office who advocate for reproductive rights, Butler previously led the nation’s largest home-care and nursing-home workers union. Yet organized labor leaders know Butler better for her role as a surrogate for Uber in 2019, when she helped spearhead the effort to prevent gig workers from receiving employment protections in California. Prominent labor leaders “felt betrayed” by Butler’s advocacy, CalMatters wrote on Sunday. 

Butler is also currently a Maryland resident, a fact that several observers noted was scrubbed from her leadership profile on the EMILYs List website after Gov. Newsom announced her appointment. 

While Gov. Newsom satisfied an early pledge he made to appoint a Black woman to the Senate, the choice of a prominent fundraiser from out of state has irked some top Democrats who advocated for Rep. Barbara Lee, one of three California Democrats, along with Reps. Katie Porter and Adam Schiff, angling to fill Feinstein’s seat. Although Congressional Black Caucus Chair Steven Horsford on Sunday urged the governor to select Lee, Newsom told NBC that Butler was his interim pick in part because “I don’t want to get involved in the primary,” he said. “That primary is just a matter of months away. I don’t want to tip the balance of that.”

Read More: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/01/newsom-senate-pick-butler-00119360

Read More: In The Back Pages: High-Level Iranian Spy Ring Busted in Washington

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The Rest

→ Following Rep. Matt Gaetz’s failed attempt to keep Rep. Kevin McCarthy from the House speakership earlier this year, Gaetz said on Sunday that he’ll now lead the effort to oust him as speaker after McCarthy brokered a short-term spending package to keep the lights on in the government till November, despite opposition from conservative members of his party. With hours to spare before the government shutdown on Sunday morning, the surprise breakthrough saw a renewal of a flood-insurance program and $16 billion in disaster relief, but none of the border-security spending Republicans had wanted to include. “This is just about spending and policy to me,” Gaetz told The Wall Street Journal about his campaign to remove McCarthy, though some within his own party say Gaetz is less concerned with legislation than with boosting his own profile after grabbing headlines during McCarthy’s contentious vote in the House. “He’s all about self-promotion,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin told the Journal. “He’s found his moment of fame because he opposed McCarthy’s speakership. And he hasn’t let it go.”

→ Though President Joe Biden is only three years older than current GOP front-runner Donald Trump, nearly three-quarters of voters said Biden is too old to serve again effectively, according to a new Monmouth University poll, while only half of voters said the same of Trump. The gap in perception about effectiveness is perhaps a small consolation to Trump as 52% of voters are not at all enthusiastic about the former president winning the GOP nomination, a sentiment essentially shared about Biden, with 53% of voters saying the same about the current president getting the nod for the Democratic ticket. The antipathy about the possible Biden-Trump rematch increases the chances of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. becoming a decisive spoiler, as the candidate announced last week that he’ll run as an independent rather than as a long-shot bid as a Democrat against Biden. It remains to be seen, however, how Kennedy will tip the scales, as a recent FiveThirtyEight poll showed Republicans liked him more than Democrats did by a significant margin.  

→ Philadelphia’s 1,413 drug overdose deaths last year were up 11% from 2021, and the fatalities dramatically increased among the city’s minority population, according to a new report from the city’s Department of Public Health. Reflecting trend lines in several other major cities, between 2018 and 2021, drug fatalities among Black and Hispanic individuals increased 87% and 43%, respectively, in the total number of drug overdose deaths, while drug fatalities among white individuals dropped 12% over the same time period. While fentanyl was present in the vast majority of the overdoses in 2022, fatalities have increasingly become multi-drug occurrences, with 70% of all overdoses involving stimulants like cocaine, a 3% increase from the year prior.

→ Speaking of the city of brotherly love, a Philadelphia journalist who wrote about the city’s drug trade and issues with homelessness was murdered in his home on Sunday night, in what appears to be a targeted attack with no obvious suspects. Josh Kruger, 39, was shot several times on his staircase around 1:30 a.m., detectives said on Monday, before the shooter fled and Kruger stumbled into the street seeking help from neighbors. “Either the door was open or the offender knew how to get the door open,” Deputy Police Commissioner Frank Vanore told reporters. Kruger was rushed to the hospital but died of his wounds shortly thereafter.

→ Writers coming back to work from the lengthy Hollywood strike are finding that the deals they had with studios are not going to be extended as the entertainment conglomerates establish a new way of doing business. According to Puck, upwards of 80% of writers learned that their contracts that were suspended during the strike will not be renewed, while at least one studio, Universal Studio Group, said it would not extend deals with writers. “The asteroid has hit,” Zack Stentz, a writer on X-Men, observed on X. As pressure on studios and streamers to turn profits only increased during the strike, the housecleaning of writer deals should pop the Peak TV bubble, with the total number of annual scripted series unlikely to ever reach the high of 600 in 2022. While that could leave many TV writers scrambling for work, the talent pool could funnel back into movies, driving a possible resurgence in film not seen since before the rise of prestige television programming.

→ Some 500 people in Central Illinois were evacuated from the area after 4,000 gallons of anhydrous ammonia spilled from a truck involved in a multi-car crash that claimed the lives of five people, including a father and his two young children, over the weekend. Authorities say the liquid ammonia, which turns into a dangerous gas when exposed to the air, was not a factor in the fatalities, though the chemical spill has renewed concerns for how toxic materials are transported across the country. In recent weeks, four incidents in Tennessee involved accidents with trucks carrying hazardous materials, including a spill in Chattanooga that forced authorities to evacuate local residents.

→ The long tail of pandemic-era disruptions has hit military barracks as the Marines said they will relax some of their uniform standards because of a camouflage shortage. Speaking on Instagram, Commandant Gen. Eric Smith said that service members could wear alternate clothing in training because woodland camouflage, the combat uniform for most Marines, remains on back order through the summer or fall of 2024. Marines will have to turn to desert-colored camo or other flame-resistant gear, though even those items are running low in military supply stores, leaving some service members to turn to thrift stores to source their own uniforms.

→ Heavy rain and floods across New York City on Friday weren’t entirely unwelcome as at least one sea lion in the city’s Central Park Zoo took advantage of the storm’s water surge to slip out of her flooded enclosure and roam around the zoo grounds. After taking a stroll, the sea lion returned of her own accord to the enclosure she shares with two other sea lions. No visitors had a chance to catch the unusual sight, as the zoo had been closed during the storm.

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The Ruthless Racketeer by Allan Levine

In the annals of crime in New York City no one was feared more than Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter, who ordered the murders of dozens of men

Antisemitica by Daniel Grant

Some of the biggest collections of anti-Jewish artifacts in the world are kept by Jews. Should they be preserved in museums, or are some things better left unseen?

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High-Level Iranian Spy Ring Busted in Washington

The trail that leads from Tehran to D.C. passes directly through the offices of Robert Malley and the International Crisis Group

By Lee Smith

The Biden administration’s now-suspended Iran envoy Robert Malley helped to fund, support, and direct an Iranian intelligence operation designed to influence the United States and allied governments, according to a trove of purloined Iranian government emails. The emails, which were reported on by veteran Wall Street Journal correspondent Jay Solomon, writing in Semafor, and by Iran International, the London-based émigré opposition outlet which is the most widely read independent news source inside Iran, were published last week after being extensively verified over a period of several months by the two outlets. They showed that Malley had helped to infiltrate an Iranian agent of influence named Ariane Tabatabai into some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. government—first at the State Department and now the Pentagon, where she has been serving as chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Christopher Maier.

On Thursday, Maier told a congressional committee that the Defense Department is “actively looking into whether all law and policy was properly followed in granting my chief of staff top secret special compartmented information.”

The emails, which were exchanged over a period of several years between Iranian regime diplomats and analysts, show that Tabatabai was part of a regime propaganda unit set up in 2014 by the Iranian Foreign Ministry. The Iran Experts Initiative (IEI) tasked operatives drawn from Iranian diaspora communities to promote Iranian interests during the clerical regime’s negotiations with the United States over its nuclear weapons program. Though several of the IEI operatives and others named in the emails have sought to portray themselves on social media as having engaged with the regime in their capacity as academic experts, or in order to promote better understanding between the United States and Iran, none has questioned the veracity of the emails.

The contents of the emails are damning, showing a group of Iranian American academics being recruited by the Iranian regime, meeting together in foreign countries to receive instructions from top regime officials, and pledging their personal loyalty to the regime. They also show how these operatives used their Iranian heritage and Western academic positions to influence U.S. policy toward Iran, first as outside “experts” and then from high-level U.S. government posts. Both inside and outside of government, the efforts of members of this circle were repeatedly supported and advanced by Malley, who served as the U.S. government’s chief interlocutor with Iran under both the Obama and the Biden administrations. Malley is also the former head of the International Crisis Group (ICG), which directly paid and credentialed several key members of the regime’s influence operation.

The IEI, according to a 2014 email from one Iranian official to one of Iran’s lead nuclear negotiators, “consisted of a core group of 6-10 distinguished second-generation Iranians who have established affiliation with the leading international think-tanks and academic institutions, mainly in Europe and the US.” The network was funded and supported by an Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) official, Mostafa Zahrani, who was the point of contact between IEI operatives, and Iran’s then-Foreign Minister Javad Zarif.

According to the correspondence, the IEI recruited several U.S.-based analysts, including Tabatabai, Ali Vaez, and Dina Esfandiary, all of whom willingly accepted Iranian guidance. These Middle East experts were then subsequently hired, credentialed, supported, and funded by Malley and the ICG where he was president from January 2018 until January 2021, when he joined the Biden administration. Malley was also ICG’s program director for Middle East and North Africa before the Obama administration tapped him in February 2014 to run negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal. Vaez joined the ICG in 2012 and served as Malley’s top deputy.

Emails quoted in the stories show that even once in government, Malley directed Vaez’s actions at ICG, sending him to Vienna where the Iranian and U.S. teams held nuclear negotiations. “Following the order of his previous boss Malley, Ali Vaez will come to Vienna,” Zahrani reportedly wrote Zarif in an April 3, 2014, email. “Who from our group do you instruct to have a meeting with him?”

Vaez wrote Zarif directly after the Iranian foreign minister expressed dissatisfaction with an ICG report on Iran. “As an Iranian, based on my national and patriotic duty,” wrote Vaez in an October 2014 email, “I have not hesitated to help you in any way; from proposing to Your Excellency a public campaign against the notion of [nuclear] breakout, to assisting your team in preparing reports on practical needs of Iran.”

These emails likely explain why Vaez was unable to obtain a security clearance in order to join Malley in the Biden administration. At the same time, they raise the question of why Malley sought to bring Vaez into the State Department in the first place, and why he remained in close operational contact with him even after he was denied a security clearance.

After the Iran deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was finalized in July 2015, ICG hired another IEI operative as a consultant—Adnan Tabatabai, not to be confused with Pentagon official Ariane Tabatabai. Like Vaez, Adnan Tabatabai also pledged to dedicate his efforts to the Iranian regime.

In an email from 2014, as the agreement was being negotiated, Adnan Tabatabai wrote to Zarif about the foreign minister’s meeting in Vienna with IEI operatives: “As you will have noticed, we are all very much willing to dedicate our capacities and resources to jointly working on the improvement of Iran’s foreign relations. Iran is our country, so we, too, feel the need and responsibility to contribute our share. When I say “we” I mean the very group you met.”

In early 2021, shortly before he joined the Biden administration, Malley brought a third IEI operative, Dina Esfandiary, into the ICG. ICG did not respond by press time to Tablet’s email requesting comment on its employees’ role in an Iranian spy ring.

In February 2021, Malley hired Ariane Tabatabai to join his Iran team at the State Department. The emails document her cloying determination to prove her worth to the Iranian regime. Shortly after the 2014 meeting in Vienna, Ariane Tabatabai sent Zahrani a link to an article she’d co-authored with Esfandiary. “As I mentioned last week, Dina and I wrote an article about the nuclear fuel of Bushehr [nuclear power plant] for the Bulletin which was published today. Our goal was to show what is said in the West—that Iran does not need more than 1500 centrifuges—is wrong, and that Iran should not be expected to reduce the number of its centrifuges.” Zahrani then forwarded the email to Zarif.

In June 2014, Ariane Tabatabai emailed Zahrani to say she’d been invited to conferences in Saudi Arabia and Israel and asked for his prior approval of her trips. “I would like to ask your opinion too and see if you think I should accept the invitation and go,” she wrote. Zahrani replied that “Saudi Arabia is a good case, but the second case [Israel] is better to be avoided.” She responded: “Thank you very much for your advice. I will take action regarding Saudi Arabia and will keep you updated on the progress.” There is no record of Tabatabai traveling to Israel.

A month later, she again wrote Zahrani asking for additional instructions. She’d been invited to join academic experts Gary Samore and William Tobey to brief House members on the Foreign Relations, Armed Services, and Intelligence committees. “I am scheduled to go to the Congress to give a talk about the nuclear program,” she wrote the IRGC official. “I will bother you in the coming days. It will be a little difficult since both Will and Gary do not have favorable views on Iran.” Zahrani forwarded the email to Zarif.

Ariane Tabatabai’s correspondence with Zahrani offers clear evidence that Malley’s protégé was an active participant in a covert Iranian influence campaign designed to shape U.S. government policy in order to serve the interests of the Iranian regime. Her requests for guidance from top Iranian officials, which she appears to have faithfully followed, and her desire to harmonize her own words and actions with regime objectives, are hardly the behavior of an impartial academic, or a U.S. public servant. Tabatabai’s emails show her enthusiastically submitting to the control of top Iranian officials, who then guided her efforts to propagandize and collect intelligence on U.S. and allied officials in order to advance the interests of the Islamic Republic.

“I know what a spy network looks like,” says Peter Theroux, a veteran Mideast analyst who is now retired from the CIA, where he was awarded the Career Intelligence Medal for his service. During his 25 years at the agency, Theroux was frequently called on to analyze the Iranian regime and its foreign spying and terror networks. “This is how recruited assets speak to their handling officers. There’s lots of the mood music around that correspondence saying, let me know what you need me to collect. It seems clear who’s the subordinate here—what you’d call responsive to tasking.”

In response to a Tablet email requesting comment on Malley’s and Tabatabai’s role in an Iranian spy ring, a State Department spokesman wrote: “We have seen the Semafor article, which does not presume it was a ‘spy ring,’ and we reject that characterization. Rob Malley remains on leave and we have no further comment due to privacy considerations. The Biden-Harris administration appointed Ariane Tabatabai to serve various roles in the U.S. government because of her expertise on nuclear and other foreign policy issues.” The Defense Department did not respond by press time to Tablet’s email requesting comment on Ariane Tabatabai’s role in an Iranian spy ring.

Whether the IEI is best characterized as an Iranian “spy ring” or as a “regime-directed influence operation” is a semantic question that beggars the larger question of how any responsible U.S. security official in possession of Tabatabai’s correspondence could have cleared her to enter the State Department building or the Pentagon—let alone cleared her to work as a chief of staff in the Defense Department, with direct access to the most sensitive real-time details of U.S. special forces operations.

It seems likely that by the time of her appointment to the Pentagon’s special operations office, Tabatabai’s covert activities on behalf of the Iranian regime were well known in Biden administration and intelligence circles. “The hoops you have to jump through to get a bare-bones top secret clearance even without compartments or special access programs are enormous,” says Theroux. “They grill you on your foreign contacts. Contacts with any foreign government raise more red flags than Bernie Sanders’ honeymoon. Contacts with senior officials from enemy governments, classified as non-frat governments like Russia, China, Cuba, as well as Iran, are in a different category altogether—what would normally be totally disqualifying.”

There is also the fact that, as early as 2014, as Tablet has reported, the Obama administration was spying on Israeli officials and their contacts within the United States, including U.S. lawmakers and pro-Israel activists. The fact that U.S. intelligence services routinely disobeyed guidelines preventing them from unmasking the identities of U.S. persons recorded in transcripts of foreign intelligence intercepts has been exhaustively demonstrated in a long series of U.S. government reports, Congressional investigations, and other reporting. Since Zarif’s communications and the IRGC’s communications were also collected, U.S. officials would have known about the IEI—and about the names of those working on behalf of Iran, such as Vaez and Tabatabai.

Theroux suggests that a range of U.S. authorities would have likely known about Malley’s involvement with the IEI as well—and that Malley would have been well aware of what they knew. “When I was on the National Security Council, the National Security Agency would call to alert me when my name had popped up in a conversation among bad actors,” Theroux recalls.

The facts of Malley’s involvement with the IEI and its agents are likely to have been old news within the Biden administration; the impending publication of the IEI emails is likely the reason why Malley was put on leave in April and had his security clearances suspended. As news of emails and their impending publication circulated in Washington, the administration moved him to the sidelines before Republican officials had the chance to demand his head on a spike.

Why an Iranian operative is still at the Pentagon, especially in a job which gives her daily access to classified information that puts the country’s most sensitive military operations at risk, is another matter entirely. “The optimistic reading,” says Theroux, “is that they were watching her to see what she does and the FBI has her apartment all teched up. But to be an optimist you have to believe the FBI is clean, rather than see this as a huge counterintelligence failure. Though, of course, it’s not a failure if they were complicit.”

So far, however, the evidence points to a less optimistic reading: The Biden administration allowed Malley to push an Iranian agent into sensitive national security positions because she was best equipped to carry out the administration’s own policy—to appease a terror regime with American blood on its hands. Because the number of American officials who want to be responsible for protecting Iran’s nuclear weapons program is limited, the White House went outside the federal bureaucracy for someone who was well-connected to the regime, and would relish the job of advancing its interests—an Iranian spy.

Congress needs to demand the Biden White House make Malley and Tabatabai available to testify immediately. It must also press to interview the security officials who buried evidence of Tabatabai’s covert activities, putting her in a position to endanger the lives of American civilians and special forces operators. It’s time to find out why the interests—and now the personnel—of the Iranian “death to America” regime intersect so frequently with those of America’s own ruling party.