Biden to nominate Elliott Abrams, who lied over Iran-Contra, to key panel

The Guardian-July 8th ,2023

by:Mary Yang

Joe Biden intends to nominate Elliott Abrams, a former Trump appointee on Venezuela and Iran who was famously convicted for lying to Congress over the Iran-Contra affair, to the bipartisan US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.

The announcement came wrapped in a list of eight Republican picks for bipartisan boards and commissions released in a White House statement on Monday.

“It’s definitely a way to reach out to neoconservatives, and to throw them a bone,” said the historian and journalist Eric Alterman, who has written about Abrams since the 1980s. “It’s a risky move on Biden’s part.”

Abrams, 75, has held senior positions in three Republican administrations, rising to prominence during a controversial run as assistant secretary of state under Ronald Reagan.

During Reagan’s second term, a congressional investigation found that senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to the Iranian government and used the money to support the Contras, a rightwing rebel group in Nicaragua – the Iran-Contra affair.

Abrams, who was assistant secretary of inter-American affairs from 1985 to early 1989, later pleaded guilty to two charges of illegally withholding information from Congress – including his role in soliciting $10m from Brunei – during two October 1986 hearings, one before the Senate foreign relations committee and a second before the House intelligence committee.

Biden, then a Delaware senator, was a member of the Senate foreign relations committee at the time.

Abrams has drawn backlash for his support for the El Salvadoran government, whose army in 1981 massacred nearly 1,000 civilians in the village of El Mozote during its civil war against a coalition of Soviet-backed leftwing groups.

A 1992 Human Rights Watch report said Abrams, as assistant secretary of state for human rights, “distorted” information to discredit public accounts of genocide. Abrams also backed US aid to the Guatemalan military dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who was later convicted for genocide and crimes against humanity, during the Guatemalan civil war.

Abrams, 75, has held senior positions in three Republican administrations, rising to prominence during a controversial run as assistant secretary of state under Ronald Reagan.

Biden, then a Delaware senator, was a member of the Senate foreign relations committee at the time.

“We only have, really, this example of legally defined genocide where the United States was complicit – and Elliott Abrams was the person who made that policy,” said Alterman, referring to US support for the Guatemalan government under Ríos Montt.

Congressional Republicans likely pushed Biden to tap Abrams to the commission, said Brett Bruen, the president of media company the Global Situation Room and a former US diplomat.

“It would be seen as interference should Biden not accede to those recommendations,” he said.

A White House official said: “It’s standard for Republican leadership to put nominees forward for these boards and commissions, along with President Biden’s own nominees.”