The City Under the Capitol

More foreign influence-peddling is alleged to be occurring in Washington, D.C. Anne Applebaum writes, “three Iran experts who have worked closely with Robert Malley, the Biden administration’s special envoy on Iran, were members of an influence network formed and guided by Tehran.” The Atlantic says:

According to reports by Semafor and Iran International, Iranian foreign-policy bigwigs such as Mohammad Javad Zarif identified think-tank staffers of Iranian origin, sponsored meetings with them, and used the group to coordinate and spread messages helpful to Iran …

A few of them ended up in and near positions of prominence in the U.S. government through connections to Robert Malley, a veteran Middle East hand in Democratic administrations. Malley, who led Obama teams focusing on the Islamic State, Syria, and Iraq, is known to favor negotiation with unfriendly governments in the region and to scorn the “maximum pressure” approach that replaced nuclear negotiation when Donald Trump entered office. Earlier this year, Malley lost his security clearance for reasons still not explained, and he is on leave from government service. (He did not reply to a request for comment.)

This follows reports that “the FBI is investigating whether Egypt’s intelligence services might have been involved in the alleged bribery scheme described in the indictment of Sen. Bob Menendez and his wife.” Recently ABC News reported that a congressional panel “obtained bank records showing Hunter Biden received wires originating from Beijing that listed Joe Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home as the beneficiary address.”

Republicans in both the House and Senate on Tuesday called for an investigation of the alleged Tehran-backed influence operation believed to have placed several of its protégés in the Biden administration, including officials close to Iran envoy Robert Malley. “The communications reveal the access Rouhani’s diplomats have had to Washington’s and Europe’s policy circles, particularly during the final years of the Obama administration, through this network,” according to published reports.

Menendez was supposed to be working for Egypt and the recent influence peddlers alleged to be operating for Iran. But Iran and Egypt are bit players. Missing from the board are the big boys, China, Russia, and the Kingdom, of which nothing has yet been publicly disclosed. Like the proverbial iceberg, the bulk of the influence business must still lie unaccounted for below the surface. One can almost channel Tolkien. “Far, far below the deepest delving of the Washington Post, the Beltway is gnawed by nameless things. Even the old politicians may know them not. They are older than them.”

Corruption may be extensive in Washington, and there is no reason to suppose it is confined to one party. The problem is that you need a clean rag if you’re to wipe a table. If all the rags are dirty, then you’re only moving the dirt around. If the extent of corruption is unknown then where the clean rags are in Washington will be a basic problem. Perhaps the only reliable way to clean the mess up is turnover. That is to churn Washington, to turn everybody in the capital out of office after a certain period, from every party, regardless. But even that might not be enough.

The problem is that the action doesn’t all happen in the great public buildings but often offstage in shadowy back rooms, dark money foundations, and lobbying offices whose operatives were never elected in the first place. Public officials don’t even have to be mentally competent as long as strings can manipulate them from remote locations. Even changes at the ballot box barely affect these underground termite cities of political operatives any more than naval gunfire penetrated the subterranean caves on Iwo Jima. They are dug in so deep that there’s no telling what’s down there.

The warren is huge, and there is nothing as permanent in Washington as a federal agency. Once created, government bureaucracies are almost impossible to abolish. Many people may have thought the Transportation Security Administration was a temporary response after Sept. 11, 2001 — and it’s been over 20 years since. Consequently, the size of permanent government grows inexorably, as does its reach. The total number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR)  “provides a sense of the volume of existing regulations with which American businesses, workers, consumers, and other regulated entities must comply.” There were 10,000 pages in 1950; today there are close to 200,000.

The monotonically increasing size of bureaucracies means that elected officials must forge alliances with these permanent behemoths. As the New York Times observed, there was a silent but deadly struggle for influence in Washington between domestic agencies, which Obama favored, and external defense agencies, which Trump supported. Labor, Education, Interior, HHS, and Justice took hits while Treasury, Defense, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs prospered.

The federal government that Donald J. Trump inherited was aging. The Civil Service system hadn’t been updated in decades. Many workers were nearing retirement. The computers were old, too. And then President Trump set about weakening the Civil Service and slashing many agencies, publicly deriding the government’s own work force as “the deep state.” Now President Biden must reckon with these problems, amid national crises that demand the coordination of the federal government. …

Career Civil Service workers are used to the shifting priorities that come with new administrations and changing party control in Washington. But many said what they had experienced over the last four years was different. They said expertise itself was under attack, along with the bedrock notion that career employees should be nonpartisan. Federal workers had also never before been told by their president that they were the enemy.

In this vast, almost unfathomable labyrinth, the battle between political factions, between rags and dirty tables, continues indefinitely with foreign influence-peddlers mingling with special interest pleaders of all descriptions. The NYT says, “the spy conflict with China is even more expansive than the one that played out between the Americans and the Soviets during the Cold War, said Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director. China’s large population and economy enable it to build intelligence services that are bigger than those of the United States.” Where are the Chinese and Russian networks? Somewhere. Somewhere.