Department of State Iran expert Sahar Nowrouzzadeh committed one unrecoverable sin in the course of her work during the Obama administration: she helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal. That apparently put her on the radar of the incoming Trump team along with conservative activists. Nowrouzzadeh, who joined the agency during the George W. Bush administration, was soon smeared in an article on the Conservative Review website as being an Obama loyalist.
Shortly thereafter, conservative extremists and incoming Trump officials started exploring whether she could be purged from the agency, writes Politico:
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 an official who falsely claimed in an email to top Tillerson aides that Nowrouzzadeh “was born in Iran” 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 was just one victim of a Trump-inspired fever swamp environment that swept through the State Department, leaving a trail of career civil service casualties in its wake.
In one email, a staffer was described as “a leaker and a troublemaker,” while another was branded a “turncoat.”
Although career staffers generally observe an ethos of nonpartisanship, many Trump officials saw them as constituting a “deep state” cabal determined to sabotage the new president’s agenda. The emails also suggest that Nowrouzzadeh may have been targeted in part because of her ethnicity, which would be a violation of federal employment law.
Now the top two Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, Reps. Elijah Cummings and Eliot Engel, are demanding answers from White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and State Department Deputy Secretary John Sullivan. In a letter, the Democrats say that the new emails provide evidence of how "extensive, blunt, and inappropriate" the partisan attacks were in the internal communications between White House staff and Trump's political appointees at the State Department.
It's perhaps no surprise to learn that Newt Gingrich and a former Dick Cheney/John Bolton advisor, David Wurmser, were in on the purge. The Democratic letter cites an exchange between the two in which Wurmser writes to Gingrich:
Newt: I think a cleaning is in order here. I hear Tillerson actually has been reasonably good on stuff like this and cleaning house, but there are so many that it boggles the mind.
Now "reasonably good" Tillerson himself is one of some 60 percent of the State Department's top-ranking diplomats who have exited, leaving nothing more than a skeleton crew at the agency. New applicants to fill those positions have reportedly fallen by half. Can't imagine why.