November 01, 2019
Brian Hook, the Trump Administration’s senior official for Iran policy, is expected to be punished for his role in getting rid of employees of the State Department, including Iranian-American Sahar Nowrouzzadeh.
The Daily Beast has reported that two government sources involved in carrying out the investigation told it Hook faced department discipline.
The department’s inspector general has been investigating Hook and other State Department officials for their involvement in personnel decisions that impacted individuals they thought were loyal to the Obama Administration and not the Trump Administration.
Several whistleblowers raised allegations against Hook and others, prompting the inspector general to analyze emails and other documents as part of the probe. The recommendation for Hook is set to be outlined in a new report by the inspector general. It is due out within the next several weeks.
Hook is one of the main Trump officials helping craft and promote the adminis-tration’s Iran policy. Hook worked with former National Security Adviser John Bolton during his time as the United Nations ambassador a decade ago, and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson brought him into the State Department to work on Middle East policy.
The Daily Beast reported in March that Hook was among at least eight administration officials the inspector general was examining over reprisals against career department personnel for their perceived disloyalty to the president.
The report, not finalized, is the second part of a larger study about the State Department. The first section found that State Department officials harassed, mistreated, and retaliated against employees deemed disloyal to President Trump. It did not mention Hook.
The public first learned about the State Department’s investigation when in early 2017, Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, a career official and Iran specialist, had her assignment to Hook’s policy-planning directorate cut short. The Conservative Review soon after wrote that Nowrouzzadeh, an “Iran deal architect,” had “burrowed into the government under President Trump.”
Outside parties, including Newt Gingrich, sent that article around to State Department officials. Hook received the article and sent it to a career staffer in the policy planning office, Edward Lacey. Lacey, in an email first reported by Politico, called Nowrouzzadeh and other colleagues “Obama/Clinton loyalists.”
Lacey told Hook, “I succeeded in ousting five whose details expired before your arrival.”
Hook replied, “Ed– This is helpful. Let’s discuss on Monday.”
It’s that email and several others that have come under scrutiny by the State Department’s IG office, the sources told the The Daily Beast.
When Nowrouzzadeh was reassigned, Politico reported on it. State officials attempted to craft a response for the piece. “[H]ow about saying something like: ‘It is regular practice for detailees to return to their parent office at the completion of their detail assignments,’” Lacey emailed colleagues on April 17, 2017, according to emails obtained by The Daily Beast.
Nowrouzzadeh replied: “Ed—My assignment was not ‘completed’.”
Democratic Reps. Eliot Engel of New York and Elijah Cummings of Maryland in August 2018 expressed alarm about Hook’s appointment as the special representative for Iran. “Internal documents … show [Hook] engaging in significant acts of political retaliation against career State Department employees,” they wrote Pompeo.
Since that time, the State Department has handed over investigative documents and emails to the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Both are conducting an internal investigation into political retaliation at the State Department. The Daily Beast said the IG report has not yet reached Capitol Hill.
Nowrouzzadeh, now 37, joined the federal government as a career employee, not a political appointee, in 2005, during the George W. Bush Administration. She left the government in 2017 and is now a research fellow at Harvard University.