A little-noticed exchange between a “senior” American official and reporters at the country’s leading newspapers has disclosed the extent to which some in the Biden administration are prepared to go in pursuit of a deal with the Iranian regime. 

In the wake of the Iranian missile strike early Sunday on a private residence at Erbil, the capital of northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region, the Islamic Republic claimed the attack was aimed at a familiar target — “the strategic center of the Zionist conspiracies in Erbil.”

The claim was quickly rejected by the Kurds and America. “There are no known Israeli sites in Iraq,” the New York Times reported conclusively. An advisor to Kurdish prime minister, Masrour Barzani, told the Sun that the Iranian claim was “far from any truth.” 

The adviser said that he had visited the site of the attack and that the target was the home of a Kurdish oil magnate, Sheikh Baz Karim Barzinji, an energy industry rival to the Iranian regime.

Prime Minister Barzani himself, in a conversation shortly after the attack with Secretary of State Blinken, highlighted the need to counter the Iranian “propaganda” that has been used “as a pretext to attack Erbil sporadically,” Kurdistan 24, a news broadcaster, reported.

Yet in conversations with the Washington Post and a reporter of the New York Times, one American official seemed to reinforce the very line the Iranians have been pressing. “A senior US official briefed on the Erbil attack told my colleague @EricSchmittNYT the building struck by IRGC ballistic missiles also served as an Israeli training facility,” wrote Times journalist Farnaz Fassihi on Twitter Monday.

“One U.S. official,” reported the Washington Post, “said that the targets included houses where a Mossad cell was suspected to have operated.”

A deputy assistant defense secretary under President George W. Bush, Michael Doran, was quick to point out the inherent danger in American officials reinforcing Tehran’s talking points. “Whether true or false, for a U.S. official to reveal this to the NYT is a scandal,” Mr. Doran wrote on Twitter. 

A Hudson Institute fellow, Mohammed Alyahya, tied the official’s claims to the nuclear deal talks between Iran and world powers. “Serious people understand that this attack was on the US,” Alyahya said. America is “committed to a deal &, to that end, will find any way to obfuscate on behalf of the IRGC.”

The Erbil incident is but the latest indication of a worrying trend in the Biden administration’s approach to Tehran. A Sun editorial raised concerns last week following reports of an Iranian plot to assassinate former American officials.

“That is shocking enough,” wrote the Sun. “Even more shocking is the talk that the Biden administration has been holding off on an indictment of Iranians involved in the scheme so as not to disrupt the negotiations with Iran in Vienna on the articles of appeasement over its atomic bomb program.” 

In the case of the Erbil strike, another American official stepped in, setting the record straight. “A senior Biden administration official refuted the earlier comment by a US official,” Ms. Fassihi followed up on Twitter, “saying the administration believes that the building that was hit was a civilian residence only and did not also serve as an Israeli training site.”

The correction came soon enough, but not before the initial false accusation was retweeted and “liked” hundreds of times and picked up by other outlets, including the Times of Israel and i24 News. There was also enough time for astute observers to garner another clear and increasingly consistent message. 

There are some in the American government who will stop at nothing, including carrying water for the Islamic Republic and directly jeopardizing our interests and those of our allies in Israel and Iraq, to see the nuclear deal come to fruition.