This Bastard Should Be In Jail Along With Obama On The Iran Deal.
Sunday on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” former Secretary of State John Kerry said President Donald Trump was not capable for the office of the presidency because he didn’t “understand America.”
When asked if Trump was capable of the job, Kerry said, “I think it’s more than doesn’t seem capable. We have had confirmed now for more than a year, and a half, examples, some by virtue of people who write a book and talk to a person like Woodward and tell him what they’re saying and observing —and Woodward is obviously a terrific reporter knows how to gather his facts and protect his flanks, so his credibility is very, very high. Some of the evidence comes directly from the president himself. For instance when you tweet chastising the attorney general of the United States for following the law and doing what the Justice Department is supposed to do, by holding Republican congressmen as accountable as anybody else and indicting them, and the president puts it in the context of affecting the elections, you have a president who clearly doesn’t understand America, doesn’t understand the Constitution, doesn’t understand the role of the Justice Department, the separation of powers, and that’s dangerous.”
He added, “And when you link it to his rush to a summit with Kim Jong-un, his pronouncements about nuclear weapons afterwards, the lack of any certainty or precision to what the accountability is for the weaponry that exists, let alone the denuclearization, we’re working in a very, very different and frankly dangerous world for our country.”
President Donald Trump claims the Obama administration offered U.S. citizenship to thousands of Iranians, including the families of certain government employees, during the negotiations on the Iran nuclear deal.
“Just out that the Obama Administration granted citizenship, during the terrible Iran Deal negotiation, to 2,500 Iranians – including to government officials,” he tweeted Tuesday, adding, “How big (and bad) is that?”
Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
Just out that the Obama Administration granted citizenship, during the terrible Iran Deal negotiation, to 2,500 Iranians – including to government officials. How big (and bad) is that?
The president, who announced U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (Iran deal) in May, appears to be referencing a Fox News story citing a recent report from Iran’s semi-official Far News agency.
Obama Loves To Kiss Iran Ass More Than Anything
“When Obama, during the negotiations about the JCPOA, decided to do a favor to these men, he granted citizenship to 2,500 Iranians and some officials started a competition over whose children could be part of these 2,500 Iranians,” Hojjat al-Islam Mojtaba Zolnour, the conservative head of the Iranian parliament’s nuclear committee and a member of the national security and foreign policy committees, revealed recently, according to Far News. He explained that the Obama administration sought to curry favor with senior Iranian officials aligned with President Hassan Rouhani.
“If today these Iranians get deported from America, it will become clear who is complicit and sells the national interest like he is selling candies to America,” Zolnour, who is close to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, further arguing that “It should be stated exactly which children of which authorities live in the United States and have received citizenship or residency.”
Fox noted that is unclear whether the Iranian politician meant citizenship or legal permanent resident (green card) status.
In 2015, the year the Iran nuclear deal was signed, the U.S. awarded green cards to 13,114 Iranians, and another 13,298 received green cards the following year, according to Department of Homeland Security data. Another 10,344 Iranians were naturalized in 2015, while 9,507 were granted citizenship in 2016.
If true, this would represent another concession by the Obama administration during negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal.
There are also longstanding concerns about the $1.7 billion payment to Iran that was portrayed by the administration as a legal settlement but coincided with the release of American prisoners, leading many observers to call it a ransom.
The Iranian politician’s comments are questionable, though. Fox News analyst and former Obama State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said his comments sound like “totally made up BS.”
Obama’s Iran deal lives on – but its days are numbered
Iran-deal supporters rejoice: President Trump is signaling that his predecessor’s signature foreign-policy legacy is unassailable.
Or is he?
The Trump administration reported to Congress on Monday that Tehran is complying with the pact, just as it did back in April. Why? Two years ago, Congress passed legislation requiring the secretary of state to announce every 90 days whether he or she can say with certainty that Iran is complying.
Under President Barack Obama, certification was automatic. But Trump repeatedly promised on the campaign trail to “rip up” the deal, calling it a “disaster.”
Yet as the deal marks its two-year anniversary, Trump has for the second time certified Iranian compliance, thereby blocking Congress from imposing nuclear-related sanctions. The administration can’t start renegotiating, or telling allies it’s time to “snap back” to those international sanctions the Iran deal erased.
So the deal lives — temporarily.
According to numerous press reports, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and Defense Secretary James Mattis won an internal debate against Special Adviser Steve Bannon, CIA Director Mike Pompeo and Trump. The latter group wanted — at the least — to say they can’t certify Iranian compliance, putting the deal in limbo and opening Iran up to nuclear sanctions without quite tearing up the whole thing.
The winning camp advised caution, reasoning that while Iran is certainly violating the deal’s spirit, it abides by its letter and raising fears of a clash with our global allies. In the end, while certifying compliance, the administration announced new sanctions on Iran for various non-nuclear offenses.
Both sides in the internal debate are right, says the Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano, who has advised Trump on world affairs during the transition period.
As Trump says, it’s a “bad deal,” Carafano told me. Yet the administration is yet to devise a “full regional strategy” to replace it. And yes, “our friends and allies clearly need to see where we’re going.”
The administration, indeed, is said to be working on an Iran policy “review” that’s due to be completed this summer. Afterwards, in three months — or six, or nine — it may well start to paint Iran’s deal violations in darker colors.
And those “marginal” violations, as they’ve been so far described, are numerous. Iran has habitually produced more uranium and heavy water than the deal allows. It has procured dual-use materiel and tested nuclear-capable missiles.
Meanwhile, Iran continues its aggressive behavior, attacking US ships in international waters and holding Americans hostage. It helps fuel regional wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen and arms and bolsters Lebanese and Palestinian terrorists.
The reason the mullahs do all that with impunity is that we have few tools left to confront them. We gave them everything — unfrozen assets, sanctions relief — up front. All we asked in return was that they do their part — nuclear restrictions, periodic on-site inspections — during a dozen-year stretch.
So Iran could decide to just pocket those perks and walk away now, declaring that America is violating the deal. In fact, they’ve already started the process.
The smarmy Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif told CNN on Sunday that Trump is in “violation of not the spirit, but of the letter” of the deal. As the extreme anti-American wing of the all-powerful Revolutionary Guard Corps gains confidence, it may well force a collapse of the deal it’s been opposed to from the outset.
Problem is, some of our allies, and certainly China and Russia, may well buy the argument that America is at fault for the collapse.
Either way, far from the unassailable piece of state craftsmanship that the deal is widely advertised to be, Monday’s qualified certification indicates that its shaky foundations are beginning to crumble.
If so — and considering that, internal debates aside, the Trump administration is full of Iran hawks — Washington better soon start moving away from the Iran deal. It’s best we, not the mullahs or their global allies, control the process of its demise.
Did Team Obama Abuse Intelligence Collection During the Lead-up to the Iran Deal, Too?
Trump and his associates may not have been the first political opponents the Obama White House targeted with a campaign of spying and illegal leaks, Tablet reported today. The Obama administration may have used information from classified foreign surveillance to smear and blackmail its political opponents during the lead-up to the Iran nuclear deal, too.
In a bombshell report in December of 2015, the Wall Street Journal alleged that Team Obama had spied on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials in order to stay one step ahead of their domestic opponents during the months-long debate about the unpopular deal. According to the Journal, the surveillance of the Israelis “also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups,” which may have been the whole point of the surveillance to begin with.
During the long and contentious lead-up to the Iran Deal the Israeli ambassador was regularly briefing senior officials in Jerusalem, including the prime minister, about the situation, including his meetings with American lawmakers and Jewish community leaders. The Obama administration would be less interested in what the Israelis were doing than in the actions of those who actually had the ability to block the deal—namely, Senate and House members. The administration then fed this information to members of the press, who were happy to relay thinly veiled anti-Semitic conceits by accusing deal opponents of dual loyalty and being in the pay of foreign interests.
This is exactly how Ben Rhodes’ infamous “echo chamber” worked as described by David Samuels in the The New York Times Magazine:
Rhodes has become adept at ventriloquizing many people at once. Ned Price, Rhodes’s assistant, gave me a primer on how it’s done. The easiest way for the White House to shape the news, he explained, is from the briefing podiums…. ‘But then there are sort of these force multipliers,’ he said, adding, ‘We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people, and you know I wouldn’t want to name them—‘
‘I can name them,’ I said, ticking off a few names of prominent Washington reporters and columnists who often tweet in sync with White House messaging.
The echo chamber was Team Obama’s insidious way of keeping politicians in line.
It didn’t take much imagination for members of Congress to imagine their names being inserted in the Iran deal echo chamber’s boilerplate—that they were beholden to “donors” and “foreign lobbies.” What would happen if the White House leaked your phone call with the Israeli ambassador to a friendly reporter, and you were then profiled as betraying the interests of your constituents and the security of your nation to a foreign power? What if the fact of your phone call appeared under the byline of a famous columnist friendly to the Obama administration, say, in a major national publication?
“At some point, the administration weaponized the NSA’s legitimate monitoring of communications of foreign officials to stay one step ahead of domestic political opponents,” says a pro-Israel political operative who was deeply involved in the day-to-day fight over the Iran Deal. “The NSA’s collections of foreigners became a means of gathering real-time intelligence on Americans engaged in perfectly legitimate political activism—activism, due to the nature of the issue, that naturally involved conversations with foreigners. We began to notice the White House was responding immediately, sometimes within 24 hours, to specific conversations we were having. At first, we thought it was a coincidence being amplified by our own paranoia. After a while, it simply became our working assumption that we were being spied on.”
This is what systematic abuse of foreign-intelligence collection for domestic political purposes looks like: Intelligence collected on Americans, lawmakers, and figures in the pro-Israel community was fed back to the Obama White House as part of its political operations. The administration got the drop on its opponents by using classified information, which it then used to draw up its own game plan to block and freeze those on the other side. And—with the help of certain journalists whose stories (and thus careers) depend on high-level access—terrorize them.
Once you understand how this may have worked, it becomes easier to comprehend why and how we keep being fed daily treats of Trump’s nefarious Russia ties. The issue this time isn’t Israel, but Russia, yet the basic contours may very well be the same.
As Lee Smith explains in Tablet, the Obama administration “redefined America’s pro-Israel community as agents of Israel” in making its case for the Iran deal and they used the same basic template to smear Team Trump, turning innocuous meetings and phone calls with the Russian ambassador into something far more nefarious.
Where the Israeli ambassador once was poison, now the Russian ambassador is the kiss of death—a phone call with him led to Flynn’s departure from the White House and a meeting with him landed Attorney General Jeff Sessions in hot water.
Obama changed the rules on distributing intercepted communications during his last weeks in office so that the intelligence could be “preserved” — which is apparently another way of saying “leaked.” Team Obama’s trail of breadcrumbs may also lead investigators to their systematic abuse of foreign-intelligence collection.
At least two Republican senators have called on Congress to investigate whether Rice had political motives for the “unmasking” Team Trump officials.
“I’m not going to prejudge here, but I think every American should know whether or not the national security adviser to President Obama was involved in unmasking Trump transition figures for political purposes,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Fox News. “It should be easy to figure out, and we will.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) called for Rice to be subpoenaed. “The facts will come out with Susan Rice, but I think she ought to be under subpoena, and she needs to be asked, ‘Did you talk to the president about it? Did President Obama know about this?’ ” said Paul on MSNBC.