The Smear Job
A U.S. journalist said he was approached by an associate of a former Trump administration official and told she had the alleged Iran email trove used to malign Iran experts, but turned it down.
A former senior Trump administration official and an associate were involved in “shopping” an alleged trove of decade-old Iranian emails to media outlets in order to smear American Iran experts and the Biden administration, another U.S. journalist approached about the material told Diplomatic.
Semafor and Saudi-linked Iran International agreed to jointly report and simultaneously publish their individual stories based on some of the material last month, despite the fact that Iran experts maligned in the stories said the emails featured in the reports were taken out of context, misrepresented and misleading, and the stories filled with inaccuracies.
The targets of the stories said the outlets did not show them the alleged trove, but cut-and-pasted a small handful of the emails, making it hard to evaluate and respond to. A U.S. source said Iran International had approached the State Department about the alleged trove in August, but then never sent them the emails. “Someone handed them 10,000 emails, and they did not ask where did it come from,” the person said.
The U.S. journalist, who did not want to be named, said several weeks before the Semafor and Iran International stories appeared, he was approached by someone he described as a cutout and mutual contact to see if he would be interested in the material, and was told that former Trump State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus had it. He did not want to touch it, he said. It was his understanding, he said, that Ortagus had been trying to shop the story to various other media outlets before Semafor agreed to pursue it in coordination with Iran International.
Ortagus served as State Department spokesperson from 2019-2021, when Mike Pompeo – a noted Iran hawk--served as Trump’s Secretary of State. Ortagus is now the founder of Polaris National Security and a frequent Fox News commentator.
When this reporter tweeted on Sept. 27th that I had been told that Ortagus had shopped the material to Semafor, Ortagus tweeted a statement that mocked me as a “crazy activist,” without explicitly denying that she had been involved.
“Apparently [because] I commented on this story yesterday, a crazy activist…is convinced I am a part of some Pompeo conspiracy to shop this story around,” Ortagus tweeted Sept. 27. “I’m flattered people think I’m this powerful.”
But just a few hours after Semafor and Iran International published their stories smearing the Iran experts on the morning of Sept. 26, Ortagus issued a lengthy press release still featured prominently on Polaris’ home page that promoted the stories and offered hyperbolic conclusions about their findings.
“Is the Biden Administration Employing and Being Advised by Iranian Sleeper Agents?” Ortagus tweeted Sept. 26, three hours after the Semafor report was published. “Today’s reporting by Semafor and Iran International indicates that senior U.S. government officials and former top advisors to Special Envoy for Iran Rob Malley were part of the Iranian regime’s ‘Iran Experts Initiative’ is grounds for immediate investigation by Congress.”
Semafor editor Ben Smith also responded to my Twitter thread Sept. 27, asserting that Semafor had been “transparent” about where they got the cache of emails. “We said where we got it!” Smith subsequently tweeted. “I have no idea what you’re talking about and that is not where we got it!”
But the experts targeted by the pieces dispute that Semafor was transparent with them, or would let them see more than copy/paste excerpts of a handful of the emails.
“They neither told us where they got the docs from, nor did they show us the real documents/files,” one of the experts said. “Only copy-paste texts.”
Another of the experts said: “We asked to see the documents. Semafor said Iran International had them. They eventually showed us copy paste of five emails.”
Another longtime Iran observer noted the outlets had also not really been transparent about how they had come into possession of the trove, and how it had been obtained, indeed whether it was part of another, possibly foreign, influence operation, or political smear operation. Iran International is reported to be Saudi funded, and is seen by observers as well as various governments as catering to an audience generally hostile to any sort of diplomatic engagement with Iran. (This despite the fact that Saudi Arabia and Iran this year formally restored diplomatic relations, under an agreement that reportedly had Iran International dial down its agitation of protests against the regime.)
The Semafor article says it “got the emails from Iran International,” Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, the CEO of Bourse Bazaar, which specializes in Iran economic matters, wrote on Twitter. “Their reporting doesn't specify how they obtained the emails. A leak? A hack?
“How the emails were obtained is of material importance to their interpretation,” he added.
A digital forensic expert weighed in on Ortagus’ press release propagating the material shortly after the Semafor and Iran International stories were published Sept. 26, and spinning the stories as evidence that Biden administration Iran advisors are “Iran sleeper agents.”
“That’s a very polished press release for someone who first learned of Semafor’s reporting ~6:40amm yesterday,” Emerson T. Brooking, an expert on digital disinformation operations at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research (DFR) lab, tweeted, in response to Smith’s reaction to my Twitter thread on Sept. 27.
Smear jobs, misinformation warfare
Stepping back, the Semafor and Iran International stories seek to discredit Iran experts seen as allied with U.S. efforts to try to reach a diplomatic solution to curb Iran’s nuclear program, an approach favored by the Biden and Obama administrations, and rejected by the Trump administration. The planted stories seem to perpetuate a campaign that has been underway much of the year targeting Biden’s Iran envoy Rob Malley, who was put on unpaid leave in June amid the suspension of his security clearance, for alleged mishandling of classified information that has not yet been publicly clarified.
Whether the campaign targeting the experts smeared in the Semafor/Iran International stories is connected to the investigation into Malley is unclear.
Ortagus’ biography includes government intelligence analysis and information operations, as well as Republican political aspirations.
During her time as State Department spokesperson, she “led U.S. government efforts to push back against sophisticated Chinese, Russian and Iranian malign influence campaigns,” her Polaris’ biography states. It also notes that she previously worked as an intelligence analyst at the Treasury Department, and from 2010-2011 served as the deputy U.S. Treasury Attache to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
In 2022, Ortagus attempted to run in the Republican primary to represent Tennessee’s Fifth Congressional District in Congress, but the Tennessee Republican Party removed her and two other candidates from the ballot, reportedly claiming she had not lived in the state long enough.
“Mischaracterization, inaccuracy”
The stories are also filled with distortions, misrepresentations, and inaccuracies, the experts said as they have had more chance to read the material.
The Semafor and Iran International articles “contain mischaracterization and inaccuracy,” the International Crisis Group said in an October 4 statement rejecting allegations against two of its staff members, Ali Vaez and Dina Esfandiary.
The stories cited a single line from an email taken out of context, only partly translated, and presented in a highly misleading way to “starkly mispresent” the writer’s meaning, the ICG statement said, among other serious flaws and distortions. In particular, it said Iran International had pulled one line of out of 2014 email from Vaez to Iran’s then foreign minister Javad Zarif, and failed to translate the rest of the email, which repeatedly asserted ICG’s independence and neutrality.
“One of the published emails, sent by Ali to Iran’s then-foreign minister, has been starkly misrepresented,” the ICG statement said. “Only one sentence of the note was translated from the original Farsi into English in the reporting. Taken as a whole, the email reads as a clear assertion of impartiality and neutrality, not a statement of sympathy toward the Iranian position.”
“My colleague @AliVaez has been smeared for one line mentioned in the piece - the only line actually translated - in a much longer email from 2014 about our @CrisisGroup work to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon,” ICG Middle East director Joost Hiltermann wrote in a Twitter thread Oct. 4.
“Have any of these critics read the whole email? Here it is, FULLY translated, written in response to the Iranian government’s criticism that our analysis had been overly harsh & biased toward the West,” Hiltermann continued. “Ali defends our non-partisanship and analytical independence.
“Ali explains to FM Zarif that while we’re committed to reflecting Iran’s views along with those of the other parties, our recommendations won’t fully satisfy anyone as we tend to pursue a middle ground,” Hiltermann continued. “The very following sentence reminds FM Zarif that Ali works for a non-partisan organisation, and our reports & analysis are independent.”
“Iran International did not translate any of this because they didn’t want you to know that,” Hiltermann continued. “Ali wasn’t doing Iran’s bidding. He was defending our independence against Iran’s criticism. And he does so politely, in line with diplomatic decorum.”
ICG Middle East senior advisor Dina Esfandiary, writing on Twitter Oct. 5, said the articles are full of “mischaracterizations, [and] falsehoods,” and amount to a “character assassination campaign” targeting her and others. They also got several basic facts wrong, she said.
“I never worked for Rob Malley, nor advised him,” Esfandiary wrote on Twitter. “He left ICG before I joined.
“That such a simple, verifiable statement was included in the original article, and not disputed by subsequent ones, shows the lack of journalistic integrity and the current low bar for publishing,” she wrote, in a longer thread.
Arianne Tabatabai, the only of the Iran experts smeared by Semafor and Iran International who works for the U.S. government, has also been grossly misrepresented by the articles. Tabatabai resigned from then US Iran envoy Rob Malley’s team in December 2021 because she thought the U.S. government should walk away from the negotiations to try to restore the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and she didn’t trust Iran’s intentions regarding its nuclear program. She wrote a 2020 paper on Iranian influence operations, and has published a well-regarded book on Iranian defense and national security policy.
“The reporting by Semafor, Iran International and others is best seen as part of a sustained effort to discredit and silence voices that support diplomacy with Iran,” the International Crisis Group statement concludes. “It undercuts serious deliberation about how to address the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program.”
**