President Joe Biden professes that he’s “deeply concerned” by the leak of such highly classified intelligence. On cue, there’s a major investigation underway by DoD and IC counterintelligence investigators to determine exactly how such TOP SECRET intelligence wound up on the open Internet. That can’t happen by accident, since highly classified IT networks operated by DoD and the IC don’t touch the Internet in any direct way. You can’t download a TOP SECRET report on to your personal email – say, to send it to Telegram – by accident: that can only happen by design, with clear intent to break the law. Whose intent was it, then? ...

We can rule out Malley, who’s been out of classified access since spring 2023, as the leaker here. But the disgraced Malley was a mentor for a generation of Democratic foreign policy cadres with an interest in Iran and the Middle East. How about Phil Gordon, leading Democratic foreign policy maven who served President Obama and since 2021 has been Vice President Kamala Harris’ own National Security Advisor? Gordon’s been tight with Malley for years plus he possesses longstanding ties to known Tehran fronts like the National Iranian American Council. Any counterintelligence inquiry would want to eliminate Gordon as a suspect here.

Which leads us to Ariane Tabatabai, a Gordon protégé who, despite being unmasked over a year ago as a leading member of a Tehran-controlled influence operation, has somehow managed to maintain her position as the chief of staff to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict. That position is one of the most sensitive in the Pentagon (SOLIC has access to extremely classified information about DoD and IC activities worldwide, including covert action) and it requires TOP SECRET-plus clearances. How Tabatabai has maintained all that for more than a year after she was outed as a tool of Tehran is a genuine mystery. Yet again, Congressional oversight inquiries into this case have been stonewalled by the White House.