When I said bad apples, I wasn't referring to just spies. I was referring to wide swaths of upper management.
The problem isn’t a traitor. The problem is an agency who allows someone suspected of spying for Iran to receive top secret battle plans involving that very country. This isn’t one or two people. It’s multiple people within the agency who believed she should still have access to top secret information such as this. As I said above, I would hope whoever is elected will look at the intelligence agencies from top to bottom and reevaluate decision making and policies. The same thing which was recommended for the Secret Service. Both have zero to do with Trump.
A lot to unpack here with Tabatabai. Y’all are mostly right.
First, to clarify, she is not a career DOD official. Or a career diplomat. Or a career academic. Or a career journalist. She’s never really done anything.
She’s one of those creatures of our system that obtains elite academic credentials and then combines that with summary research done by others to engage in the opinions industry. She basically shows up in organizations, public or private, and produces nothing other than to influence decision makers, inside and outside the organization.
The federal government has two basic types of employees - political appointees and career workers. Tabatabai is a Biden administration political appointee. Not every political appointee has administration or decision making responsibilities. In fact, less than 1,000 of the 4,000 or so political appointees have that function. Many political appointees exist to provide policy advice and problem solving band width to the administrators. Administrators rely on these folks as a check against senior career workers, who may give the administrator bad advice to act in their own self interest, or in some cases are actively engaged in sabotaging the policy objectives of the administration for a variety of reasons. Some are “spying” for Congress to cruise to retirement, some have friends in industry who want to capture government function etc. So senior political appointees want their own staff to watch the organization because one or two people can’t do it alone. So that’s why Project 2025 is such a big deal for the Dems. Without any proof, they extrapolate for political purposes that the same people who wrote that document will be advising the administrators if Trump is elected.
Very few political appointees are hand picked by the President. About 100 require his/her direct review and action. About 300 more cross his desk and he/she has some level of knowledge and familiarity of them and their functions. This is everyone from the WH Chief of Staff, the Secretary of the Army, to the Undersecretary for payroll at cabinet agencies down to the various U.S. Attorneys across the country.
The individual agencies in turn hire the advisors assigned to the administrators in close consultation with the White House. In some cases, the White House will hire advisors directly and place them in agencies. But at all times, the White House has knowledge of, and has helped vet, every political appointee.
Not all political administrators and advisors have security clearances. In fact, a shocking number that you would think would be cleared have no clearance beyond the informal confidential or work/product level.
Those that do have a clearance must undergo the same vetting procedures that career government workers and military personnel must undergo.
Ultimately, the choice to grant or deny a clearance is vested in the President. He typically delegates that function to impartial career officials in the various agencies who are trained and experienced professionals most with military counterintelligence experience. The President has the ability to grant or revoke a clearance, except for the members of Congress who have clearance by virtue of holding the purse and being elected and the tiny number of Congressional staffers with clearances, maybe 30 staffers total. Just because you are cleared does not mean you are entitled to view or use classified information at that level. Even the President does not have the ability to see or be informed of some classified materials. But he does have the ability to over rule security clearance denials or people who work for him who have been granted that authority in some cases.
All of that said …
Tabatabai is a Biden administration political appointee of dubious professional credentials given her function and experience.
She is not an administrator, she is an advisor presumably providing the advice function described above. She did her undergrad at Stony Brook. She got a PhD at an upper mid tier UK university on par with a near Ivy, then went to work for the Rand Corporation where she began her professional opinion career. She did largely nothing after that which merits a senior government post except show up and have opinions. Shes had various stops as a visiting researcher at several Ivys and Georgetown performing research and advocacy work on and off campus. But I don’t believe she’s ever actually taught students as a professor. So impressive for average folks but there’s nothing in her background that is notable or puts her amongst Washington elites. At some point she began working on Iran nuclear policy maybe because she speaks Farsi and Iran policy was a trendy thing in the Obama Administration when she was starting out. Or some other reason. We don’t know.
As most people know through common sense, every foreign government in the world funds influence campaigns in the United States. Our friends, competitors, and enemies alike. They pay people with opinions and plausible credentials to voice the opinion of the foreign government. In some cases, you have to register with the government to do that, in other situations you don’t. Influencing public opinion leads to everything from starting or avoiding wars to making sure foreign aid is raised each year to setting up your friends and cronies with sweet U.S. aid packages and development contracts.
And all of that is fine as long as you aren’t in government, and when in government, you are not working your old job for your old friends and employers.
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