Elliott Abrams
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Elliott Abrams is the American foreign policy official whose appointment to a presidential advisory board on public diplomacy in July 2023 John Kiriakou used as a compact demonstration of how little separates the two American foreign policy establishments.

The career, as Kiriakou recites it

Kiriakou ran the record in a single sequence. Abrams "was Ronald Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America who was in up to his neck with Iran-Contra and ended up pleading guilty to two counts of obstruction of justice over the Iran-Contra scandal. He was pardoned by George H.W. Bush."

From there, in Kiriakou's account, Abrams went to work for George W. Bush and "helped to perpetuate the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction," then during the Trump administration served as special envoy for Iran and afterwards for Venezuela, the tenure that withdrew the United States from the JCPOA and "tried to install this pretender to the throne Juan Guaido in the presidency of Venezuela."

The appointment as evidence

The destination is what interested Kiriakou: "now he's working for the Biden administration on public policy advocacy. This is just a euphemism for propaganda."

His conclusion was categorical. "It goes to show you that there is no difference between the neoliberal foreign policy and the neo-conservative foreign policy. It's exactly the same and the players are interchangeable." Offered the image of one bomber painted with a rainbow flag and a Black Lives Matter sticker and another without, Kiriakou accepted it as the description of American foreign policy.

See also

- Iran-Contra
- John Bolton
- National Security Council
