Rob Malley, the Biden administration’s Iran envoy, revealed Thursday that the investigation into his alleged mishandling of classified information, which prompted the suspension of his security clearance and his suspension from his post, was closed earlier this year.

“I didn’t know what they were looking at. The claim was that I mishandled classified information. I don’t know what they were referring to. They never told me what they were referring to. I still don’t know what they’re referring to. I may never know what they were referring to or looking at,” Malley said on a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace webinar on Thursday. “I do know that after roughly two years of the situation, the Justice Department notified my lawyers that they had closed the investigation.”

Malley was first suspended around April or May of 2023, which would likely place the end of the investigation — based on the two-year timeline Malley laid out — during the Trump administration.

A State Department inspector general’s report last year found that Malley’s suspension had been mishandled: State Department officials allowed him to temporarily remain in his role as Iran envoy and failed to broadly disclose the fact that he had been suspended, even to his direct supervisor or other top officials.

Congressional Republicans have sought for years to obtain additional information about the investigation, but were consistently refused by State and Justice Department officials. They have alleged Malley transferred classified information to a personal device, which was hacked by a hostile actor.

Discussing Iran talks under the Biden administration with moderator Aaron David Miller, a Carnegie senior fellow, Malley suggested that President Joe Biden was never as interested in or committed to reaching a nuclear deal as President Barack Obama had been, and was unwilling to expend the political capital needed on Capitol Hill or with Israel to make a deal happen.

“When I started off with the Biden administration, I thought President Biden was eager to get back into the deal. That was a misperception on my part. And we took our healthy time to express our interest to the Iranians. And we started off by saying that we wanted a longer, stronger deal,” Malley said. “I think at some point the Biden administration, the team, concluded this is not working, and so we went back to a pure revival of the deal. But by then, perhaps the Iranians had different ideas in mind.”

He said that both Biden and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameinei had been unenthusiastic about reaching a deal and overestimated the other side’s interest in it.

Malley criticized the Biden administration for keeping the Trump administration’s maximum pressure sanctions in place to try to bring Iran to the table after campaigning against those sanctions.

“For President Obama, this was a priority. It was one of his top foreign policy, perhaps even top priority writ large,” Malley said. “I think President Biden never felt that it was that important. He never was in love with the deal. And I think he was not prepared to overcome for a long time the political obstacles that he was facing and the regional obstacles — Israeli opposition in particular.”

He argued that if the Biden administration had been able to “rip the band-aid” and seal a deal early on in Biden’s term, it could have mitigated, if not fully avoided, the political backlash in the midterms and the 2024 election, though he said that he was unsure if the Iranians would have agreed to a deal, given their fear that a future U.S. administration would have again withdrawn.

Malley added that there had been a “real chance” to reach a deal in August 2022, but said that “at that point was clearly [the Iranians’] responsibility” to agree.

He also said that the core premise of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — that Iran’s nuclear program and sanctions relief could be decoupled from Iran’s other malign activities in the region — may have been faulty, given both American and Iranian political considerations.

Asked by Miller if he would have resigned from the Biden administration over its handling of the war in Gaza, had he still been in his position, Malley said he “very much would like to think that I would have resigned.” 

He called the U.S.’ handling of the war “a blemish, a scar that we’re not going to be able to overcome, far worse than Iraq, in my view, because this is a case where we enabled, participated in, fueled, what an increasing number of organizations are calling a genocide.”