The New Yorker:

The longtime State Department official and Iran-Contra player on Israel’s war in Gaza and his own record in Latin America.

By Isaac Chotiner

For more than four decades, Elliott Abrams has been near the center of American foreign policy. Abrams was an Assistant Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration, a deputy national-security adviser under George W. Bush, and a special representative for both Iran and Venezuela during the Trump Administration. Currently, he is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

During his tenure with the Reagan Administration, Abrams was involved in supporting authoritarian regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador, both of which were committing extensive human-rights violations that were widely documented in the press. (The Guatemalan leader, Efraín Ríos Montt, was eventually convicted of crimes against humanity and genocide, though his conviction was later thrown out on technical grounds; in El Salvador the military was responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.) Abrams was known in the Reagan years for his aggressive performances in TV interviews and his criticism of journalists who questioned the Administration’s human-rights record. After Abrams’s wife suggested machine-gunning Anthony Lewis, then a columnist for the New York Times, in 1987, Abrams said, “I wouldn’t waste the bullets. I would rather have them go to the Contras. They would use them to more effect.”

Indeed, in the mid-nineteen-eighties, after Congress had banned military aid to Nicaragua’s Contra rebels, Abrams began overseeing the Restricted Interagency Group, which coördinated Central America policy. He eventually pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress about his knowledge of how the Contras were being funded and armed, but he was pardoned in 1992 by the outgoing President Bush. In 2023, President Biden controversially nominated Abrams for the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, which is under the jurisdiction of the State Department. (He has not yet been confirmed.)

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