Elliott Abrams

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

Abrams is considered to be a neoconservative.

He is currently a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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

His father was an immigration lawyer.

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.

Abrams' parents were Democrats.

His first cousin is attorney Floyd Abrams.

Abrams received his Bachelor of Arts from Harvard College in 1969, a master's degree in international relations from the London School of Economics in 1970, and his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1973.

He practiced law in New York in the summers for his father, and then at Breed, Abbott & Morgan from 1973 to 1975 and with Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson and Hand from 1979 to 1981.

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.

From 1977 through 1979, he served as special counsel and ultimately as chief of staff for the then-new senator Daniel Moynihan.

Dissatisfaction with President Carter's foreign policy led Abrams to campaign for Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election.

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.

His nomination to Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs was unanimously approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on November 17, 1981.

Abrams was Reagan's second choice for the position; his first nominee, Ernest W. Lefever, had been rejected by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 5, 1981.

During his time in the post, Abrams clashed regularly with church groups and human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch.

In an October 1981 memo, weeks prior to his confirmation in the Senate, Abrams asserted, "human rights is at the core of our foreign policy."

Ríos Montt came to power via a coup in 1982, overcoming the forces of General Fernando Romeo Lucas García.

Thirty years later, Ríos Montt was found guilty of overseeing a campaign of mass murder and torture of indigenous people, genocide, in Guatemala.

Ríos Montt, who claimed he had no operational control of the forces involved, was convicted of genocide against the Maya-Ixil population.

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.

As Assistant Secretary of State, Abrams advocated for aid to Guatemala under then dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, erroneously stating in 1983 that his reign had "brought considerable progress" on human rights.

According to an article in The Washington Post, in a 1984 appearance on the program Nightline, Abrams clashed with Aryeh Neier, the executive director of Human Rights Watch and with the leader of Amnesty International, over the Reagan administration's foreign policies.

They accused him of covering up atrocities committed by the military forces of U.S.-backed governments, including those in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, and the rebel Contras in Nicaragua.

Abrams accused critics of the Reagan administration's foreign policy towards Latin America of being "Un-American" and "unpatriotic."

The Lawyers Committee, Americas Watch and Helsinki Watch wrote a report in 1985, charging that Abrams had "developed and articulated a human rights ideology which complements and justifies Administration policies" and undermined the purpose of the human rights bureau in the State Department.

According to American University political scientist William M. LeoGrande, "Communist governments were the worst human rights violators in the world, Abrams believed, so virtually anything done to prevent Communists from coming to power (or to overthrow them) was justifiable on human rights grounds. This theory fit neatly into the Cold War presumptions that framed Reagan's foreign policy and allowed the administration to rationalize supporting murderous regimes so long as they were anti-Communists. In practice, it was little different from Henry Kissinger's realpolitik that discounted human rights issues entirely."

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

Critics say that Abrams and the Reagan administration misappropriated the term human rights, with Tamar Jacoby writing in 1986, "in a period that more or less coincided with Abrams' tenure as assistant secretary of state for human rights, the White House endeavored to appropriate the banner of human rights for itself to use it in battle not only against communist regimes but also, in a more defensive way, against domestic opponents of its human rights policy."

His involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration led to his conviction in 1991 on two misdemeanor counts of unlawfully withholding information from Congress.

He was later pardoned by president George H. W. Bush.

During George W. Bush's first term, he served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on the National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs.

At the start of Bush's second term, Abrams was promoted to be his Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy, in charge of promoting Bush's strategy of "advancing democracy abroad."

In the Bush administration, Abrams was a supporter of the Iraq War.

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

He served as the U.S. Special Representative for Venezuela from 2019 to 2021 and as the U.S. Special Representative for Iran from 2020 to 2021.

During Donald Trump's term, on January 25, 2019, he was appointed by Mike Pompeo as Special Representative for Venezuela.

On September 1, 2020, he was further appointed to concurrently serve as the U.S. Special Representative for Iran.

On July 3, 2023, he was appointed by President Joe Biden to the non-partisan U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.