The State Department placed President Biden’s Iran envoy, Robert Malley, on unpaid leave on Thursday amid a review of his security clearance.
“I have been informed that my security clearance is under review,” said Mr. Malley in an email. “I have not been given any further information, but I hope the investigation will be resolved favorably and soon. In the meantime I am on leave.”
The Department of State confirmed that Mr. Malley was on leave, but did not provide further details. axes i CNN had previously reported that the security clearance of Mr. Malley.
Mr. Malley, a longtime diplomat and Middle East analyst, is known as an advocate for dialogue between the United States and Iran. As a senior Obama White House official, he was instrumental in negotiating the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which curbed Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions.
President Donald J. Trump unilaterally withdrew from the deal and pushed Iran to accelerate its nuclear program. Mr. Malley has spent most of his tenure in the Biden administration trying to resurrect the deal.
After little progress toward restoring the pact, the Biden administration is seeking a much more limited and informal understanding with Tehran to avert a possible war and free several Iranian-Americans imprisoned in Iran.
A person familiar with the situation confirmed that Mr. Malley had been placed on unpaid leave Thursday afternoon, following a period of paid leave. It is not clear what caused this change.
The State Department offered only a one-line statement on the matter.
“Rob Malley is on leave and Abram Paley is acting as special envoy for Iran and leading the department’s work in this area,” department spokesman Matthew Miller said in the statement.
Before the news of his resignation, some foreign officials had pointed out that Mr. Malley appeared to be playing a less prominent role in US Iran policy in recent months. A congressional official said Mr. Malley had been conspicuously absent from a mid-May briefing on Iran for members of Congress, and administration officials had suggested at the time that he was on leave for personal reasons.
When the Biden administration held indirect talks with Iranian officials in Oman this spring, it was the White House’s top Middle East official, Brett McGurk, who played the leading role. It is considered that Mr. McGurk takes a harder line toward Tehran and what could be achieved through negotiations that Mr. Malley.
The talks to restore the nuclear agreement, led by Mr. Malley, collapsed last summer just as officials thought they had made a breakthrough, following what Western officials called new Iranian demands that appeared designed to sabotage the process. Iran’s demands include a guarantee that a future U.S. president would not again renege on a nuclear deal as Mr. Trump; Biden officials say it’s impossible to promise that.
The Times reported this month that the United States and Iran were discussing a deal that would, in part, see Washington release billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets for highly restricted humanitarian use.
In exchange, Iran would agree not to enrich uranium to bomb-grade material – a move the United States has warned would likely trigger military action – and take other steps, including expanded cooperation with international nuclear inspectors and the promise not to sell ballistic missiles to Russia, Iranian officials have said.
The political experience of Mr. Malley’s experience in the Middle East dates back to the Clinton administration, and he served as a senior National Security Council official under President Barack Obama, including as coordinator to combat the Islamic State terrorist group. During the Trump era, Mr. Malley headed the International Crisis Group, a non-profit political organization dedicated to global conflict resolution.
Mr. Malley has long been a target of Iran hawks and political opposition figures inside Iran who see him as dangerously conciliatory to the Iranian regime. He has long argued that a strategy of crushing economic and political pressure on Iran is bound to fail and that the United States must engage in productive dialogue with its leaders, however unsavory they may be.
Mr. Malley is a childhood friend of Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken; both attended the same high school in Paris when their families lived in France.
