Elliot Abrams (born 1948) is a prominent neoconservative foreign policy expert and attorney. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard College in 1969, a Master of Science from the London School of Economics in 1970, and a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1973. Early in his career, he served as special counsel to Senator Henry M. Jackson (1975-1976) and as special counsel and chief of staff to Senator Daniel P. Moynihan (1977-1979). During the Reagan administration (1981-1989), he held several Assistant Secretary of State positions: for International Organization Affairs, Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, and Inter-American Affairs, receiving the Secretary of State's Distinguished Service Award from George P. Shultz in 1988. Abrams was a key figure in the Iran-Contra affair, for which he was convicted in 1991 on two misdemeanor counts of unlawfully withholding information from Congress; President George H.W. Bush pardoned him in 1992. In the George W. Bush administration, he served in multiple National Security Council roles from 2001 to 2009, including senior director for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Organizations (2001-2002), Near East and North African Affairs (2002-2005), and as Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy (2005-2009), overseeing Middle East policy. He was president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (1996-2001), a commissioner and chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (1999-2001, 2012-2014), and a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. Under President Trump, he served as U.S. Special Representative for Venezuela (2019-2021) and for Iran (2020-2021). Currently, he is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, teaches U.S. foreign policy at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, chairs the Tikvah Fund and Vandenberg Coalition, and in 2023 was appointed by President Biden to the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. Abrams is the author of books including 'Undue Process' (1993), 'Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America' (1997), 'Tested by Zion' (2012), and 'Realism and Democracy' (2017). He is fluent in French and Spanish and has been recognized with awards like the Washington Institute for Near East Policy's Scholar-Statesman Award (2012).