It’s a long read, but Politico‘s piece is worth the time.
In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.
Project Cassandra was making serious headway against Hezbollah’s drug dealing and money making—a $1 billion per year business that would seem to dwarf its terrorist activities—but as ex-President Barack Obama (D) and his (ex-)Secretary of State John Kerry got closer and closer to concluding Obama’s Executive Agreement with Iran that put a fig leaf over Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Cassandra was increasingly restricted. David Asher, a DoD finance forensics analyst who helped establish Project Cassandra:
The closer we got to the [Iran deal], the more these activities went away. So much of the capability, whether it was special operations, whether it was law enforcement, whether it was [Treasury] designations—even the capacity, the personnel assigned to this mission—it was assiduously drained, almost to the last drop, by the end of the Obama administration.
And here is the confession of all of that by Obama administration personnel who are figuratively hiding their faces so as not to be identified and called to account:
Former Obama administration officials declined to comment on individual cases, but noted that the State Department condemned the Czech decision not to hand over Fayad.
Because ObamaTalk always was so effective at changing the behavior of our nation’s enemies.
And
Several of them, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they were guided by broader policy objectives, including de-escalating the conflict with Iran, curbing its nuclear weapons program and freeing at least four American prisoners held by Tehran, and that some law enforcement efforts were undoubtedly constrained by those concerns.
There it is. Curbing the drug trade, cutting Hezbollah off from its major source of money were not as important as that administration’s public appearances regarding peace in our time with Iran. What else was less important than appearances?
…insight into not only drug trafficking and other criminal activity worldwide, but also into Hezbollah’s illicit conspiracies with top officials in the Iranian, Syrian, Venezuelan, and Russian governments—all the way up to presidents Nicolas Maduro, Assad, and Putin….
And more directly, getting at “the Ghost,” Abdallah Safieddine, Hezbollah’s longtime envoy to Iran who was—and still is, courtesy of these decisions
a major supplier of conventional and chemical weapons for use by Syrian President Bashar Assad against his people.
All bought and paid for with the proceeds from that drug trade. Al Assad gassing his own people, after all, just wasn’t that important. All enriching Hezbollah, too, and funding its own weapons inventory and increasing its threat to Israel. Notice, too, that drug trade connection to Iran, with whom Obama and his Kerry were so desperate to conclude a deal with which they could pretend to look good in the eyes of the American Left.
There’s lots more in the Politico piece.
It’s hard to believe that the Progressive-Democrats in Congress at the time, at the very least the Party’s leadership, didn’t also know about this preference for an enemy’s—a terrorist organization’s—prosperous drug trade.
This is the set of priorities, the level of morality, that the Progressive-Democratic Party will have on offer in the 2018 mid-terms, the 2020 general election—imagine another Progressive-Democrat President—and beyond.