Sahar Nowrouzzadeh: A new target of Trump's political revenge?

March 22, 2018

Iranians in Diaspora , Politics

Independent Aggregator of Iran-related News/Events, Kodoom.com: Despite his campaign pledges, Trump has been purging the State Department of moderate and independent voices, and Rex Tillerson was not the only target there. According to Politico, Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, an Iran expert at the State Department has recently found herself at the center of a smear campaign by a conservative website that described her as an Obama administration holdover, and supporter of the Iran nuclear deal, who had "burrowed into the government" under Trump. Focusing on her role in the negotiation of Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran, the article was headlined, "Iran deal architect is running Tehran policy at the State Dept." Rather than ignoring the wildly inaccurate report, Trump administration members seized upon it, sharing negative information (much of it wrong) about Nowrouzzadeh, who was ultimately transferred as a result.

Nowrouzzadeh emailed Brian Hook, the new chief of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, where she worked on Middle East issues, to insist that the article was "filled with misinformation." She assured Hook that, since joining the government under George W. Bush in 2005, she had always “adapted” to shifting U.S. policy priorities — as any career government staffer is expected to do. She asked for his help in correcting the record.

According to emails obtained by POLITICO, the agitators included former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who sent the article to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s chief of staff, and a Trump official who told top Tillerson aides that Nowrouzzadeh "was born in Iran" — she was not — and that she had wept after Trump’s election.

The emails show that State Department and White House officials repeatedly shared such misleading information about Nowrouzzadeh, deriding her as an Obama cheerleader and strong advocate for the nuclear deal with Iran, which Trump had repeatedly denounced. Later, after Nowrouzzadeh was reassigned to another job, some State Department officials tried to mislead a POLITICO reporter about whether she’d completed her full tenure in Hook’s policy shop.

Nowrouzzadeh first attracted the attention of conservative media outlets during the Obama years after her name, which indicated her Iranian ethnicity, appeared on a public White House document. Conservative reports questioned her national loyalties and fixated on the fact that she had interned with the National Iranian American Council, an advocacy group that strongly supported the nuclear deal and generally favors better U.S.-Iranian relations.

More recently, Nowrouzzadeh co-authored a report in December titled "This is Why Trump’s Strategy for Iran Will Fail."

Referring to Nowrouzzadeh and Tillerson, two top Democrats, Elijah Cummings and Eliot Engel, claim they have evidence staffers at the State Department were removed for political reasons. In a letter sent to White House chief of Staff John Kelly and Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan Friday, the Democrats said they have "extremely disturbing new documents" that top administration officials worked towards a "cleaning" of employees who didn't support the president enough.

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