CNN reports:

President Joe Biden announced Monday his intention to nominate a former appointee under former President Donald Trump with a controversial past in Latin America to the bipartisan United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.

Elliott Abrams, who has served in three Republican administrations, most recently acted as the Trump administration’s special envoy to Iran and Venezuela where he was tasked at the time with directing the campaign to replace Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro.

The Republican insider’s long history in foreign policy is marked by a 1991 guilty plea for withholding information about the Iran-Contra affair that earned him two misdemeanor counts, two years probation and 100 hours of community service – though his crimes were later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush.

The secret Iran-Contra operation, which took place during Abrams’ time as an assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration, involved the funding of anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua using the proceeds from weapon sales to Iran despite a congressional ban on such funding.

Again in his role under former President Ronald Reagan, Abrams was also blasted by a Human Rights Watch report for his attempts in a February 1982 Senate testimony to downplay reports of the massacre of 1,000 people by US-trained-and-equipped military units in the Salvadoran town of El Mozote in December 1981 – the largest mass killing in recent Latin American history. He insisted the numbers of reported victims were “implausible” and “lavished praise” on the military battalion behind the mass killings – stances he doubled down on when they were put on display during a 2019 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing by Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, who used his history in Latin American to call into question his credibility. [Continue reading…]

What? A totally indefensible decision from Biden.
Abrams is a neocon hawk who served under Reagan, Bush, & Trump, pushed for wars every time, pled guilty as part of Iran-Contra, & human rights groups say he helped cover up war crimes in Central America. https://t.co/pNU81tn9ur

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) July 3, 2023

I worked at the International Human Rights Law Group in the late 80s. Every morning there‘d be new reports of assassinations, torture, disappearances, and massacres in Central America while Elliott Abrams was in charge of “human rights” under Reagan. It was a nonstop bloodbath.

— Sanho Tree (@SanhoTree) February 14, 2019