President Joe Biden nominated former Trump official Elliott Abrams to the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.
The controversial neoconservative has served in three Republican administrations, most recently serving as former President Donald Trump’s special envoy to Iran and Venezuela. His role in the Iran-Contra scandal and defense of human rights abuses by the U.S.-backed Salvadoran military in the 1980s has made him the target of ire from progressives, leading to a showdown with Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) during a congressional hearing in 2019. His nomination is likely to draw fury from Biden’s progressive supporters.
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The ACPD is “charged with appraising U.S. Government activities intended to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics and to increase the understanding of, and support for, these same activities,” the State Department’s website reads.
“The ACPD conducts research and symposiums that provide honest assessments and informed discourse on public diplomacy efforts across government,” it continues.
Abrams was in charge of removing Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro from power during the Trump administration but has since denounced the former president. He even claimed that despite being nominated by him, he disliked Trump the entire time.
“In 2016, I said Donald Trump was not fit to be president, and my view on that never wavered,” he told Forward in January 2021.
However, Abrams’s biggest critics are on the Left. They criticize his human rights record, specifically over his alleged role in attempting to cover up Salvadoran human rights abuses.
During his tenure as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs in the Reagan administration, Abrams was accused in a Human Rights Watch report of “artfully” distorting “several issues in order to discredit the public accounts” of the El Mozote massacre, during which hundreds of civilians, largely women and children, were raped and murdered by Salvadoran troops. The massacre is described as the deadliest in recent Latin American history.
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Omar referenced the incident during Abrams’s testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee and then used it as an excuse to ask Abrams whether or not he would support violence against civilians if it forwarded U.S. interests. Abrams dismissed her question as “ridiculous.”
“I suppose there is a question in there, and the answer is that the entire thrust of American policy in Venezuela is to support the Venezuelan people’s effort to restore democracy to their country. That’s our policy,” he said.
