Tucker Carlson, Rob Malley and Bill Gates walk into a Gulf hotel. 

It’s not the beginning of a joke, but rather, part of the speaker lineup at the Doha Forum over the weekend in Qatar.

As we’ve written about frequently over the last year, Doha has gone to great efforts to establish itself as a critical cog in the wheel of a functioning global society. Nowhere were the fruits of that labor on display more than at the two-day Doha Forum, held at the glitzy Sheraton Grand Doha Hotel.

Alongside traditional conference-circuit speakers — among them former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Microsoft founder Gates, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack, U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker and Heritage Foundation senior fellow Victoria Coates — were more controversial voices. 

Those voices include Carlson as well as Malley, the former Iran envoy who was suspended and had his clearance revoked for his alleged mishandling of classified documents; and Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, which was a co-sponsor of the forum, who has in the past faced accusations of operating as an unregistered foreign agent for Iran.

The only public panel at the forum focused on Gaza was sponsored by Malley’s International Crisis Group, which came under fire after reports in 2023 that it had been infiltrated by an Iranian influence operation.

In Doha, Carlson, a last-minute addition to the forum’s lineup, sat in conversation with Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, a 20-minute conversation that preceded a sit-down between Donald Trump Jr. and investor Omeed Malik.

When discussing efforts to rebuild Gaza, Carlson suggested that Qatar should refrain from helping “rebuild a region that has been destroyed by a country [Israel] that has also bombed” them. Carlson also mocked Americans and lawmakers who have called out Qatar as a “terror state” or terror “financier,” despite Doha’s well-documented involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood and harboring of Hamas. 

The interview with the Qatari prime minister provided Carlson with another prominent perch from which to spread falsehoods. In one instance, Carlson insisted that aside fromPresident Donald Trump, “no American president has ever sided with an Arab state over Israel.” Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman responded on X that U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia during the Reagan administration and the Suez crisis during the Eisenhower administration were among examples where the U.S. sided against Israel.

In response to Carlson promoting the statement on social media, Friedman, who served in Trump’s first administration, called it “demonstrably false,” and asked Carlson, “What is it about the facts that offends you so deeply?” 

But the platforming of extreme voices at the Doha Forum went beyond Carlson. Neil Patel, co-founder and CEO of Tucker Carlson Network, who spoke during a session on “Media Power and the Search for Truth,” received very little questioning on Carlson’s promotion and platforming of antisemitism. When asked about being “under attack” for bringing in “all sorts of voices” — a subtle nod to Carlson’s platforming of neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes — Patel refrained from mentioning Fuentes by name. Instead, he encouraged open discussion, adding that there needs to be a “free market of ideas.”

Such a “free market of ideas” has allowed, in an age of digital manipulation and engagement farming, antisemitism to permeate political discourse.

Patel shared the stage with Nika Soon-Shiong, the millennial activist and publisher of the far-left Drop Site News, which traffics in distorted claims and half-truths (one so severe that last week a Palestinian diplomat condemned its reporting as “propaganda”).

If the appearances of Carlson, Soon-Shiong, et al watered down the perceived seriousness of the conference, the decision by business executives and current and former government officials to attend gave Doha added legitimacy.

As one longtime attendee of the Forum wrote on X, “[N]ever has Qatar displayed its immense convening power more effectively than this year.”

In an era in which American political figures face blowback for appearing at conferences that also platform extremist voices — such as Rep. Ro Khanna’s (D-CA) appearance this fall at Arabcon, where other speakers downplayed the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks — more mainstream speakers at the Doha Forum faced no such condemnation, and legitimized the conference and its organizers in the process.

That lack of condemnation underscores the degree to which Qatar’s strategy of infiltrating virtually every element of Western society — from media to sports to academia to government — has rendered it a powerful and at times dangerous force, and one that forces for Western values and democracy are unwilling to challenge or confront.

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.”