Obama told the public a story about preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, insisting that any agreement had to be verifiable, and vowing that sanctions would “snap back” into place if the mullah’s cheated. At the negotiating table, meanwhile, his administration gave away the store, agreeing to the promotion of Iran’s industrial nuclear capabilities (rationalized as civilian use); abiding continued centrifuge development; delegating verification duties to the U.N.’s feckless International Atomic Energy Agency; choreographing side deals between Iran and the IAEA, which would not be disclosed to Congress; tweaking the deal when Iran was out of compliance to avoid any “snap back”; and orchestrating ransom payments for the release of U.S. hostages: $400 million in untraceable cash stacked on pallets and flown to Tehran for delivery to the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism; and another $1.3 billion in 13 furtive transfers of $99,999,999.99 each out of the Treasury Department’s slushy “Judgment Fund,” camouflaged as litigation settlement payments.35
The administration marveled at how easy it was to sculpt and sell the Iran “narrative” (that’s what it was, and how they talked about it). “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old,” scoffed Ben Rhodes to The New York Times. “Their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”36 Rhodes knows narrative. A former novelist whose brother David runs CBS News, Rhodes was Obama’s deputy national security adviser (i.e. Susan Rice’s deputy). The Iran deal narrative was his script to write. He is unapologetic about filling it with deceptions and misdirection when necessary. With most outlets reporting from Washington, few news organizations expend the resources needed to maintain foreign Bureaus; the administration thus exploited the astonishing degree to which the press relied on a like-minded left-leaning administration for foreign affairs guidance. It crafted tales of a modernizing, moderating Iran. It deployed its ready-to-hand noble Islam narrative: Secretary Kerry telling the howler that the Iranians wouldn’t dare build nukes because Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, had issued a fatwa against it.37 All these tales were fit within Rhodes’s leitmotif: You either wanted the Iran deal or you wanted war.
Whether intentionally or not, the Times’s David Samuels gets to the Obama practice of narrative that achieved the Iran deal … and that would ultimately gin up Russia-gate:
Like Obama, Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal. He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press. His ability to navigate and shape this new environment makes him a more effective and powerful extension of the president’s will than any number of policy advisers or diplomats or spies.38
But it was policy advisers, diplomats, and spies—their rhetoric, their posturing, and their leaks—who propped up the carefully crafted storylines by which the Obama administration drove its agenda. They knew who the heroes were, so care was taken to cast the villains—the Saul Alinsky dictum that progressives must “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”39 Facts that helped were cherry-picked; facts that hurt were contorted, misstated, or edited out of the plot.
While these practices of processing and presenting intelligence suited Brennan, they did not sit well with many American intelligence agents. In 2015, more than fifty analysts formally complained that their reports on ISIS and al-Qaeda were being altered by senior officials to support misleading Obama-administration narratives. The whistleblowers pointed fingers, in particular, at the office of National Intelligence Director James Clapper and at the Defense Department’s Central Command. The analysts complained that reports were edited to remove unwelcome information, that candid assessments (i.e., negative assessments) of counterterrorism progress were discouraged and sometimes rejected by their superiors, and that they often self-censored out of concerns that their careers would otherwise flag.40
Three House committees (Intelligence, Armed Services, and Appropriations) joined forces to investigate the allegations and found that the Obama administration had rampantly politicized its intelligence product. Then-Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kansas)—now President Trump’s secretary of state after first serving as his CIA director—helped lead the congressional inquiry. As he reported:
After months of investigation, this much is very clear: from the middle of 2014 to the middle of 2015, the United States Central Command’s most senior intelligence leaders manipulated the command’s intelligence products to downplay the threat from ISIS in Iraq.
The result: consumers of those intelligence products were provided a consistently “rosy” view of U.S. operational success against ISIS. That may well have resulted in putting American troops at risk as policymakers relied on this intelligence when formulating policy and allocating resources for the fight.
Abuse of Power in the Service of Progressive Narrative
To get the Iran deal done, the Obama administration did more—much more—than politicize intelligence to minimize Iran’s commitment to building nuclear weapons and support of anti-American terrorism. Obama officials exploited their foreign counterintelligence powers to stay a step ahead of their political opposition.
Sound familiar?
Once again, the invaluable Lee Smith provides the details.41 Obama, Brennan, Rice, Rhodes, and the rest of the narrative-minded Obama political team realized there would be vigorous Israeli opposition to the Iran deal, just as there was ardent American opposition. Although Israel is an important democratic and regional ally, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, became surveillance targets—agents of a foreign power, treated no differently under the law than such operatives of hostile foreign powers.
Fair enough. It is simply a fact that allies occasionally spy on each other. Obviously, their interests sometimes diverge. But there was something different about this monitoring initiative. It was not targeted merely at Israeli officials plotting their opposition strategy. The Wall Street Journal reported in late December 2015 that the targeting “also swept up the contents of some of [the Israeli officials’] private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups.”42 Smith elaborates:
“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 realtime 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.”
Smith elaborates:
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.
This is the Russia-gate scenario to a tee: Political spying under the guise of legitimate national security monitoring. Subterfuge by the Kr
emlin is incontestably a legitimate basis for intelligence collection—a compelling one, in fact. Yet, even a compelling rationale can be used pretextually.
We know the Obama administration was not above such things.43 Indeed, there was not even an arguable justification for Brennan’s CIA to spy on the Senate Intelligence Committee—it was so beyond the pale that his initial (false) denial seemed credible. But there are many examples of politicized investigative abuse. Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson catalogues a number of them.44
For instance, Obama’s IRS harassed and investigated conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, a politicized initiative that stymied the groups’ ability to contest Obama’s reelection in 2012. With great indignation, President Obama, the beneficiary of the malfeasance, publicly railed that the IRS conduct was “outrageous,” and that wrongdoers would “have to be held fully accountable” since there was “no place for it.” Obama then held no one accountable while his handpicked IRS commissioner, John Koskinen, stonewalled congressional investigators and Lois Lerner, the official at the center of the scandal, retired with a full pension.45
The administration monitored journalists. Attorney General Eric Holder’s approved the seizure of personal and business phone records of Associated Press reporters en masse (i.e., not a particularized search targeting a specific journalist suspected of wrongdoing). Moreover, Holder authorized a search warrant targeting the emails of reporter James Rosen, then of Fox News, in a leak investigation. To get the warrant, the Justice Department represented to a federal court that Rosen could be guilty of a felony violation of the Espionage Act for the unauthorized handling of classified information. Yes, the same Espionage Act that the Obama Justice Department chose not to invoke against Hillary Clinton—who was not a journalist with constitutional free-press rights but a public official with a sworn duty to safeguard classified information.
In 2011, President Obama loosened surveillance “minimization procedures,” lowering the bar for scrutiny of the communications of American citizens incidentally swept up in foreign-intelligence gathering. Thereafter, as we shall soon see, the Obama administration systematically exploited its foreign counterintelligence surveillance powers to spy on Americans, in flagrant violation of court-ordered surveillance procedures.
The “Fast and Furious” scandal involved a blatant Obama administration politicization of law enforcement: to wit, a “gun-walking” investigation in which thousands of firearms were allowed to be transferred illegally to Mexico. This cockamamie scheme was designed to serve a political narrative about the evils of American gun commerce, concocted to promote the progressive agenda of restricting Second Amendment rights. One of the walked guns was later used by illegal aliens who, in 2010, murdered U.S. border patrol Agent Brian Terry. After misleading lawmakers about the Justice Department’s awareness of the scheme and stonewalling investigative committees, Holder became the first attorney general in American history to be held in contempt of Congress. In apparent effort to retaliate against and undermine the credibility of ATF Agent John Dodson, a whistleblower who exposed Fast and Furious, the Obama Justice Department leaked investigative information to the media. Shortly before Holder was held in contempt, President Obama invoked executive privilege to shield Fast and Furious documents from disclosure.46
Holder’s Justice Department also corrupted the judicial process in the service of advancing political causes and punishing political enemies and scapegoats. We have already noted the transparently political prosecution of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the anti-Muslim video producer the Obama administration shamefully blamed for the Benghazi massacre. The Justice Department was also heavy-handed in its indictment of Dinesh D’Souza, the writer, filmmaker, and strident Obama critic, over a trivial campaign finance violation.
It is freely conceded that D’Souza was guilty of using straw donors to contribute $15,000 to the campaign of Wendy Long, an old college friend who ran against Hillary Clinton in 2008 for one of New York’s Senate seats. The comparatively small illegal contribution made no difference to the race, which Hillary Clinton won by 46 points. Such violations are routinely handled by payment of a fine to the Federal Election Commission rather than felony prosecution; indeed, the Obama Justice Department somehow summoned up the compassion needed to decline prosecution against the 2008 Obama campaign for nearly $2 million in illegal contributions—allowing the matter to be quietly settled over a Christmas holiday for $375,000, a record fine but still less than the $500,000 in bail prosecutors demanded that D’Souza post. And although Congress has prescribed a maximum two-year prison term when the violation is prosecuted, the Justice Department piled on a false-statements charge for the same offense, so that D’Souza would face up to seven years’ incarceration if convicted at trial. When he pled guilty, the Justice Department pushed for a jail sentence, which the judge declined to impose.47
More “appalling” and “grotesque,” to borrow just some of an incensed federal district judge’s description, was the Obama Justice Department’s corruption of the 2010 prosecution of seven New Orleans police officers. In the anarchy that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005, there were reports of shots fired at police on the Danziger Bridge. In the chaos, responding police shot and killed two men (one developmentally disabled), wounding four others. All the victims were African-American. Four of the seven officers involved were either African-American or Hispanic, yet the incident was predictably distorted into an episode of racial violence. After state authorities failed to win convictions, the Justice Department approved a prosecution alleging felony civil-rights and firearms offenses.
As the case was proceeding toward trial, Justice Department lawyers, using pseudonyms, posted on-line blog commentary in the Times-Picayune aimed at inflaming the jury pool against the cops—depicting the New Orleans Police Department as a fish “rotten from the head down” with racism. After some of the cops were bludgeoned into pleading guilty to obstruction charges, and others were convicted at trial, one prosecutor’s role in the smear campaign came to light. District U.S. attorney Jim Letten assured Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt not to worry because, “Gospel truth,” no other government lawyers were involved. But Judge Engelhardt soon realized the Justice Department was stonewalling his questions and obscuring rather than examining the misconduct. When the dust settled, it emerged that other prosecutors were also complicit in the smear campaign—a fact that was well known to the prosecutor running the “investigation.” The Justice Department had also pressured witnesses with prosecution until they backed out of testifying on behalf of the police, and engaged in plea-bargaining that promised “shockingly disparate” sentences for those who agreed to plead guilty rather than force the government to prove its case at trial.
Most egregiously, one of the chief culprits in the public smear campaign turned out to be Karla Dobinski, a longtime veteran of Main Justice’s notoriously radical Civil Rights Division. Dobinski had been assigned to the case as part of a “taint team”—i.e., her only job was to safeguard the rights of the accused officers (making sure information they were compelled to provide to the police internal-affairs unit was not used against them). It is unclear how many inflammatory posts Dobinski published and which Obama Justice Department officials knew what she was up to because, as the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals later found, she was “disturbingly vague” when the district judge sought answers. What is clear is that she urged others to keep posting anti-police commentary—aptly excoriated by Judge Engelhardt as a “wanton, reckless course of action.”
The Obama Civil Rights Division, it should go without saying, will be best remembered for refusing to enforce the civil rights laws on behalf of white victims; for pushing the administration’s narrative that the nation’s police departments suffer from endemic racism; and for inflaming tensions in such tinder boxes as Ferguson, Missouri, after the shooting death of Michael Brown (Brown had robbed a store and attacked a police officer), and Sanford, Florida after the shooting death of
Trayvon Martin (during a fight, Martin was beating the shooter—a Hispanic man the press labeled a “white Hispanic” in order to stoke the racism storyline). As the Civil Rights Division well knew, even as it collaborated with such provocateurs as Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and Black Lives Matter, its threats to bring civil rights prosecutions in these cases were frivolous. The civil rights laws, however, were a useful pretext for launching investigations of municipal police forces; the municipalities could not afford the prohibitive cost of litigating against the Justice Department and its nearly $30 billion per annum budget, so they typically entered consent decrees—agreeing to adopt Obama-dictated policing practices.48
In the New Orleans case, the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals found that the government’s purported internal probe “simply refused to follow up” on indications of press leaks by officials knowledgeable about the investigation. And as you’ll be shocked—shocked—to hear, the Justice Department somehow managed to “lose” data from key Internet portals for the years 2010 and 2011. The Fifth Circuit found that this purge of emails and other memoranda meant Judge Engelhardt’s “attempt to discover other online prosecutorial misconduct was … undermined.” After considering the case for two years, the appellate court strongly affirmed Judge Engelhardt’s extraordinary decision to throw out convictions and dismiss the case. Consistent with Obama administration practice, a few officials quietly retired with their benefits intact, U.S. attorney Letten stepped down with praise from Attorney General Holder, and Karla Dobinski, safely ensconced at the Civil Rights Division, simply moved on to the next case.49
Ball of Collusion Page 11
