Is Rob Malley the New Alger Hiss?

The Democrats’ longtime point man on Iran gets a soft-landing after his government career stalled over security concerns – but what’s really going on?

This newsletter has reported extensively on the recent fall from grace of Rob Malley, the Iran fixer for the Obama then Biden administrations, who had his security clearances suspended by the State Department amid reports of his mishandling classified information. Malley, who is esteemed on the Left for his foreign policy experience, particularly in the Middle East, was suspended from his White House job without pay, an indication of the seriousness of the allegations against him.

We don’t know anything about the specific accusations surrounding Malley, which the State Department has refused to divulge to Congress, much less the public, citing privacy concerns, but the referral of the investigation over to the FBI, taking it out of Foggy Bottom’s hands, inevitably leads to suspicion that Malley is more than merely misunderstood here. Unable to perform his job without security clearances, Malley found himself in bureaucratic limbo this summer, with his long career in the U.S. Government stalled, perhaps permanently.

Therefore, Malley is making plans for a future beyond Washington, DC, we learned a few days ago with the announcement by Princeton University that it’s adding the controversial bureaucrat to its faculty this fall at the School of Public and International Affairs. Per the press release:

Robert Malley, currently on leave from his role as a special envoy for Iran in the State Department, comes to SPIA as a John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs & Co. Visiting Professor and Visiting Lecturer. He will teach a graduate course this fall on foreign policy decision-making, and one to two undergraduate courses in the spring focused on some combination of diplomacy, negotiation, and foreign policy.

It's always nice to find an Ivy League port to escape your Beltway storm and Malley was welcomed by the SPIA dean with the endorsement, “Rob Malley’s significant diplomatic experience and interactions with multiple presidential administrations will be of enormous value to our students.” Malley himself added: “While I am on leave from the State Department, I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to work with the next generation of public servants at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. I look forward to my time at Princeton and returning to government service in due course.”