The true presidential collusion scandal

A US President colluding with a hostile foreign power against the interests of his own country? Sounds like a scandalous abuse of the US constitution demanding high level investigation.

Yet while Special Counsel Robert Mueller pursues his corrupted investigation of a non-existent collusion scandal involving President Trump, a real one has been exposed involving President Obama.

Politico has published an explosive investigative piece by Josh Meyer which states that the Obama administration shut down a federal inquiry into international drug smuggling, money laundering and terrorism by Hezbollah in order to keep both Moscow and Tehran sweet during the negotiations over the Iran nuclear deal.

Meyer reports that Project Cassandra was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organisation into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

Over the next eight years agents mapped Hezbollah’s secret networks with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies, tracking cocaine shipments and dirty cash — they believed — to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

But Obama administration officials derailed the investigation. Approval for significant arrests and investigations was denied. The Justice Department declined requests to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force. And the State Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries where they could be arrested.

This obstruction of a crucial investigation to keep US and other western citizens safe, from both cocaine and terrorism, came from the top. President Obama had said he would improve relations with Iran as part of a broader rapprochement with the Muslim world. To that end, nothing was to be allowed to derail the Iran nuclear deal — which itself not only opened the way to an eventual Iranian nuclear armoury but also, through the relaxation of sanctions, funnelled money to Iran which it could use to finance more terrorism and its strategic objective in taking control of the Middle East.

No surprise then that, as Meyer notes, the then CIA director, John Brennan, recommended that “the next president has the opportunity to set a new course for relations between the two countries” through not only direct dialogue but “greater assimilation of Hezbollah into Lebanon’s political system”.

Astoundingly, Brennan thought Hezbollah was “a very interesting organization,” having evolved from “purely a terrorist organization” to a militia and, ultimately, a political party with representatives in the Lebanese Parliament and Cabinet, and he wanted to “try to build up the more moderate elements.”

This of course was garbage. How can you have moderate genocidal jihadis? Hezbollah, which has stationed more than 150,000 missiles in Lebanon pointing at Israel, is now an army through which Iran, the single greatest threat to the free world, has in effect taken the Lebanese government and people hostage.

The harm done by the Obama administration to US and western security through blocking Cassandra cannot be over-estimated. Meyer writes:

“Lebanese arms dealer Ali Fayad, a suspected top Hezbollah operative whom agents believed reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a key supplier of weapons to Syria and Iraq, was arrested in Prague in the spring of 2014. But for the nearly two years Fayad was in custody, top Obama administration officials declined to apply serious pressure on the Czech government to extradite him to the United States, even as Putin was lobbying aggressively against it.

“Fayad, who had been indicted in U.S. courts on charges of planning the murders of U.S. government employees, attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization and attempting to acquire, transfer and use anti-aircraft missiles, was ultimately sent to Beirut. He is now believed by U.S. officials to be back in business, and helping to arm militants in Syria and elsewhere with Russian heavy weapons.”

Worse yet:

“Project Cassandra members say administration officials also blocked or undermined their efforts to go after other top Hezbollah operatives including one nicknamed the ‘Ghost”, allowing them to remain active despite being under sealed U.S. indictment for years. People familiar with his case say the Ghost has been one of the world’s biggest cocaine traffickers, including to the U.S., as well as a major supplier of conventional and chemical weapons for use by Syrian President Bashar Assad against his people.”

A Congress investigation into the Politico revelations is said to be imminent, as well it might.

But guess what the reaction is of the liberal establishment to these jaw-dropping revelations about this deeply traitorous behaviour by the Obama administration. You know, those liberals who are so concerned about the US constitution and want to impeach Trump for the crime of having been elected because he’s supposedly such a danger to life and liberty.

They’ve either denied Meyer’s piece out of hand or simply ignored it. Meyer has robustly pushed back here against the weak denials and insults bowled at him by the State Department and Iran-deal shills.

Huffington Post has published a laughable riposte by the President of the National Iranian American Council, no less, claiming the Politico story is false and “poorly-sourced”. Objective and disinterested, huh?

In fact, Meyer’s piece seems very well-sourced. Moreover, the essence of it has actually been admitted on the record:

“One Obama-era Treasury official, Katherine Bauer, in little-noticed written testimony presented last February to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, acknowledged that ‘under the Obama administration … these [Hezbollah-related] investigations were tamped down for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.’”

The silence about this from the mainstream media in both the US and Britain — even given the daily evidence of their institutionalised anti-western bias, not to mention adulation of Obama and hatred of Trump — is beyond staggering.