Last week, the State Department inspector general issued a report pointing to serious failures regarding the suspension of Robert Malley, its special envoy for Iran. In the spring of 2023, the State Department suspended Malley due to an FBI investigation into his mishandling of classified information, which the agency believes he shared with Tehran. According to the inspector general, State Department officials covered up the suspension and continued to allow Malley access to classified information. Seth Mandel comments:

A first-class appeaser, Malley seems to have lost his sense of boundaries in his eagerness to gift Iran a new nuclear-legitimization deal and gobs of Western cash. But Malley’s alleged indiscretion is only part of the story. What he did as part of his official duties is a scandal in itself.

Malley was part of the Obama administration’s negotiating team that fooled itself into the lopsided Iran nuclear deal, which President Trump then pulled the U.S. out of. In 2021, Malley was invited back by the Biden administration to try to get a new deal. He showed up so ready to give away the store that he embarrassed other U.S. negotiators and the Europeans.

While on leave for allegedly mishandling classified information in his role as envoy to the Iranians, Malley has been given a soft landing with plum teaching posts at Princeton and Yale. His main subject, in the words of the Wall Street Journal: “U.S. foreign policy and human rights.”

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.