CNN
—
President Joe Biden announced Monday his intention to appoint a former appointee under former President Donald Trump with a controversial past in Latin America to the bipartisan US Public Diplomacy Advisory Commission.
Elliott Abrams, who has served in three Republican administrations, most recently served as the Trump administration’s special envoy to Iran and Venezuela, where he was then tasked with leading the campaign to replace Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro .
The privileged Republican’s long foreign policy history is marked by a guilty plea in 1991 to withholding information about the Iran-Contra affair that cost him. two misdemeanorstwo years of probation and 100 hours of community service, although his crimes were later pardoned by President George HW Bush.
The Iran-Contra covert operation, which took place during Abrams’ time as assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration, involved the financing of anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua using proceeds from arms sales to Iran despite a congressional ban on such funding. .
Again in his role under former President Ronald Reagan, Abrams also came under fire a Human Rights Watch report for his attempts in Senate testimony in February 1982 to play down reports of the massacre of 1,000 people by US-trained and equipped military units in the Salvadoran city of El Mozote in December 1981. the biggest mass murder in the recent history of Latin America. He insisted the number of reported casualties was “unbelievable” and “prodigious praise” for the military battalion behind the mass killings, positions he doubled down on when exposed during a 2019 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing by Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, who used his history in Latin America to cast doubt on his credibility.
He later served as Senior Director of the National Security Council and then as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor under former President George W. Bush. Abrams currently serves as a senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He attended Harvard College, the London School of Economics and Harvard Law School and served as two former US senators.
The US Public Diplomacy Advisory Commission is a bipartisan body and allows no more than four of its seven members appointed by the president to be from any political party, according to the Department of State.
The commission “evaluates U.S. government activities aimed at understanding, informing, and influencing foreign audiences” and “may gather and disseminate information and issue reports and other publications to the secretary of state, the president, and Congress,” according to the commission Department of State.
Current members include Sim Farar, the managing member of JDF Investments Company; William Hybl, former special counsel to Reagan; and Anne Terman Wedner, a political organizer and former foreign service officer: Four seats on the commission remained vacant as of March 2023, according to the National Archives.
