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.”[1]
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.”[2]
The Venezuela portfolio
Kiriakou had been making the same argument about Abrams four years earlier, when the subject was who was actually running American policy toward Venezuela. His answer was that it was not the president — “this president doesn’t even, he couldn’t locate Venezuela on a map. It’s not him, he’s too stupid to do it” — but two officials: John Bolton, whom he calls “one of the most dangerous men in America,” and Abrams, “a convicted criminal from the George H. W. Bush administration and again from the George W. Bush administration.”[3]
The career summary he gave then was a job description rather than a résumé: Abrams “was the one who was responsible for the Iran-Contra affair,” and “spent 12 years working for Republican presidents overthrowing Latin American governments. This is what he does.” At the time of that interview he held the post that made the pattern institutional — senior director for Latin America at the National Security Council.[4]
Kiriakou attributes the elevation of Juan Guaidó to Abrams personally. Guaidó, in his description, was “a graduate student from George Washington University right down the street — he’s a nothing, he’s a nobody,” unknown even in Venezuela “until Elliott Abrams decided that this guy is going to be the president of Venezuela.” He had never been elected to anything nationwide, having won only a small district seat in the popular assembly, and was “not a national figure in Venezuela by any stretch of the imagination.”[5]
Even against that record, Kiriakou treated the 2019 rehabilitation as a surprise on its own terms: “even with Donald Trump as president, Elliott Abrams was literally the last person I thought would be rehabilitated and brought into international” policy — a man he describes as “a proven war criminal.”[6][7]
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.”[2]
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.”[8] 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.[8]