31 Facts About Elliott Abrams

Elliott Abrams was born on January 24,1948 and is an American politician and lawyer, who has served in foreign policy positions for presidents Ronald Reagan, George W Bush, and Donald Trump.

Elliott Abrams was a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Elliott Abrams served as the US Special Representative for Venezuela from 2019 to 2021 and as the US Special Representative for Iran from 2020 to 2021.

Elliott Abrams led the 1998 Project for the New American Century letter demanding the removal of Saddam Hussein as a primary policy goal.

Elliott Abrams was born into a Jewish family in New York in 1948.

Elliott Abrams attended the Little Red School House in New York City, a private high school whose students at the time included the children of many of the city's notable left-wing activists and artists.

Elliott Abrams received his Bachelor of Arts from Harvard College in 1969, a Master of Science in international relations from the London School of Economics in 1970, and his Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1973.

Elliott Abrams worked as an assistant counsel on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1975, then worked as a staffer on Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson's brief campaign for the 1976 Democratic Party presidential nomination.

Elliott Abrams first came to national prominence when he served as Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs in the early 1980s and later as Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs.

Communist governments were the worst human rights violators in the world, Elliott Abrams believed, so virtually anything done to prevent Communists from coming to power was justifiable on human rights grounds.

Elliott Abrams was generally considered a skilled and influential bureaucrat in the human rights bureau.

Elliott Abrams frequently defended the human rights record of the El Salvador government and attacked human rights groups as communist sympathizers when they criticized the El Salvador government.

In early 1982, when reports of the El Mozote massacre of hundreds of civilians by the military in El Salvador began appearing in US media, Elliott Abrams told a Senate committee that the reported number of deaths at El Mozote "was not credible," reasoning that the reported number of deaths was greater than the likely population, and that there were survivors.

Elliott Abrams implied that reports of a massacre were simply FMLN propaganda and denounced US investigative reports of the massacre as misleading.

In 1991, Elliott Abrams admitted that he knew more than he acknowledged in his congressional testimony, cooperated with Walsh and entered into a plea agreement in which he pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress.

Elliott Abrams was sentenced to a $50 fine, probation for two years, and 100 hours of community service.

In 1997, Elliott Abrams was publicly sanctioned by the District of Columbia Bar for giving false testimony to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair.

Elliott Abrams was appointed special assistant to the President and the NSC's senior director for Near East and North African Affairs on December 2,2002.

The Observer wrote that Elliott Abrams had advance knowledge of, and "gave a nod to," the Venezuelan coup attempt of 2002 against Hugo Chavez.

The Intercept has reported that Elliott Abrams had a key role in disrupting a peace plan proposed by Iran, right after the US invasion to Iraq in 2003.

Elliott Abrams accompanied Condoleezza Rice as a primary adviser on her visits to the Middle East in late July 2006 in the course of discussions relating to the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict.

On May 16,2016, Elliott Abrams wrote a historical piece in The Weekly Standard predicting that Donald Trump would "fail colossally" in the 2016 election to which he drew parallels with the 1972 election.

In February 2017, it was reported that Elliott Abrams was Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's first pick for Deputy Secretary of State, but that Tillerson was overruled by Trump.

Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Elliott Abrams is a member of the US Holocaust Memorial Council and maintained a CFR blog called "Pressure Points" about US foreign policy and human rights.

For example, in February 2019, Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota questioned whether Elliott Abrams was the correct choice for such a role because of his conviction of lying to Congress about his role in the Iran-Contra affair, and his historical support for previous instances of right-wing regime change in Central and South America in the 1970s and 1980s.

In 2021, Elliott Abrams founded a new group called the Vandenberg Coalition, named after Arthur Vandenberg, who helped build the foundations for NATO after World War II.

On 3 July 2023, Elliott Abrams was nominated to the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy by President Biden.

Elliott Abrams still needs to be confirmed by the Senate before serving on the commission.

Elliott Abrams is neoconservative and was one of the Bush administration's intellectual architects of the Iraq War.

Elliott Abrams gave his impressions of working personally with three different US Presidents, and the differences between their presidential styles, in an interview in 2023.