The suspected Biden Regime appointee, Ariane Tabatabai, an Iranian Muslim who serves as the Bureau Chief to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s aide for Special Operations was reportedly authorized to access highly classified information, and has not yet lost her security clearance despite being named as part of an Iranian influence campaign in leaked emails.

Townhall Republican lawmakers who have been warning about an Iranian influence campaign, specifically targeted at Democrats on Capitol Hill and Democratic presidential administrations, aren’t surprised about the latest top secret intelligence leak out of the Pentagon. The leak, which was exposed over the weekend, shows the a Pentagon official with a top secret security clearance gave Iran U.S. intelligence about Israel’s attack plans inside the country.

NY Post Ariane Tabatabai appeared to be a willing recruit in the covert influence operation run by Tehran’s Foreign Ministry, according to a trove of leaked files revealed last month by Semafor. She was previously a key aide to the suspended Iran envoy Robert Malley, whose secret ties to Tehran sparked congressional uproar.

Since early 2022, Tabatabai has been chief of staff to the Pentagon’s assistant secretory of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, Christopher P. Maier.

Malley was quietly placed on unpaid leave in June for his alleged mishandling of “protected material.”

But the Pentagon will let Tabatabai, 38, keep her $153,434-a-year job, along with her top secret security clearance, the Washington Free Beacon reported Wednesday. Republicans reacted with fury to news that Tabatabai will keep her job — and her access to the Pentagon’s most sensitive secrets — and called her an Iranian “spy.”

“Biden’s DoD is REFUSING to revoke the security clearance of an Iranian spy working at the Pentagon,” Ernst wrote on X. “More of POTUS’s appeasement strategy that has emboldened [Iran] & its proxies, like Hamas, & threatened our nat’l security.”

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said he may subpoena Tabatabai as part of his committee’s probe into Malley.

It’s no surprise Biden-Harris officials are committing TREASON by leaking U.S. Intelligence to Iran.

I flagged over a year ago that there is a senior official within the DOD who was part of an Iranian influence campaign. pic.twitter.com/CnDbsWLy54

— Rep. Brian Mast (@RepBrianMast) October 22, 2024

Tabatabai, 38, who was brought up in Tehran as the daughter of one of the country’s leading political thinkers, has openly argued that Iran is “too powerful to contain” — and has urged the United States to align with the Islamic republic and break its ties with Israel and the Gulf states, for America’s own good.

Her background and writings cast doubt on the wisdom of the Pentagon’s defense of the Iranian-born Tabatabai, whose Pentagon perch gives her access to America’s critical military intelligence.

Tabatabai, a US citizen born in Tehran, recalled Iran as “a country where one learns about hating ‘Zionists’ before being able to spell the word” in a 2014 Tumblr post, although she allegedly claimed to not “want to have anything to do with any of that.”

After graduating from SUNY Stony Brook in 2008, she returned to Iran, where her father had been inching back into the regime’s good graces. He became an adviser to President Muhammad Khatami and was apparently close to President Hassan Rouhani, who presented him with an award in 2019.

In 2014, less than a year into Rouhani’s first term, Tabatabai was one of three Western-based academics quietly invited by the Iranian Foreign Ministry to help form a secret influence group, the Iran Experts Initiative, the leaked documents said.

Within weeks of the IEI’s formation, Tabatabai apparently delivered — sending Zahrani articles she wrote in the Boston Globe and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in which she claimed that Iran needed nuclear capabilities not for weapons but for the “production of radioisotopes for medical purposes” and for “desalination, an energy-intensive process.”

Her goal, she explained to Zahrani, “was to show … that Iran should not be expected to reduce the number of its centrifuges” in the ongoing nuclear negotiations.

She scored face time with top Iranian officials, including then-Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, to glean quotes for a January 2015 paper she published in the journal International Affairs, a coup for a PhD candidate.

Within weeks of the IEI’s formation, Tabatabai apparently delivered — sending Zahrani articles she wrote in the Boston Globe and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in which she claimed that Iran needed nuclear capabilities not for weapons but for the “production of radioisotopes for medical purposes” and for “desalination, an energy-intensive process.” Her goal, she explained to Zahrani, “was to show … that Iran should not be expected to reduce the number of its centrifuges” in the ongoing nuclear negotiations.

Meanwhile, documents show, she used her Harvard email address to seek Zahrani’s approval of her attendance at international conferences — and even to request his help as she crafted testimony to deliver to a US congressional hearing on the nuclear deal.

In a single week in April 2015, as the Iran deal neared completion, she published four articles in influential publications like Foreign Policy and sat for multiple interviews, much to the delight of her Tehran contacts,the emails show.

“With or without a deal, Iran is a force to be reckoned with in the Middle East,” she wrote in the National Interest in an analysis titled “Mission Impossible: Iran Is Too Powerful to Contain.” “The balance of power is really what Iran has been seeking,” she insisted in November 2018, soon after former President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA and imposed “maximum pressure” sanctions on Tehran.

In fact, she argued, Iran’s support of “non-state actors, terrorist groups, militias, insurgents” was all America’s fault. “Iran’s relationships with these players” — including Hamas and Hezbollah — “are largely shaped on Iran’s need to overcome isolation,” Tabatabai said at the Middle East Institute.