The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook

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Politico

An ambitious U.S. task force targeting Hezbollah's billion-dollar criminal enterprise ran headlong into the White House's desire for a nuclear deal with Iran.

Josh Meyer

Dec. 17 2017

 

Part I

A global threat emerges

How Hezbollah turned to trafficking cocaine and laundering money through used cars to finance its expansion.

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.

The campaign, dubbed 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 organization 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 working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies.

They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests.

 

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The White House was driven by a broader set of concerns than the fate of the nuclear talks, the former White House official said, including the fear of reprisals by Hezbollah against the United States and Israel, and the need to maintain peace and stability in the Middle East.

Peace And Stability In The Middle East..............................2 lies in one sentence, how efficient of him

 

 

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Obama’s Iran Deal Makes Trump’s Russia ‘Collusion’ Look Like Child’s Play

What wouldn't the former president do for Iran?

David Harsanyi

December 18, 2017

 

We don’t know how Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump administration will play out, but if it’s half as bad the Obama administration’s coddling of terror-supporting Iran, it should be a massive national scandal.

Empowering terrorist groups. Paying ransom that emboldened our enemies to kidnap Americans. Creating an echo chamber that undermined a free press. Releasing spies, terrorists, and criminals who assisted not only our enemy and her terrorist proxies, but Russia as well. In the Iran deal, we have clear-cut case of the United States handing over extensive concessions to a nation that openly aimed to destabilize our interests, attack our allies, and kill our people — for nothing in return. It’s worse than anything we know about “Russian collusion.”

 

On Sunday night, Politico sent an email previewing an another investigative article alleging that the Obama administration had “derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed, Bashar al-Assad-allied, Justice Department-designated terrorist organization Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States.”

This email dramatically underplays the outlet’s reporting. While it looks like the Obama administration neutralized efforts to stop a terrorist group from funding its operations through criminal enterprises in the United States — which should be a major scandal itself — according to Josh Meyer’s source-heavy reporting, it also decided to let a top Hezbollah operative named Ali Fayad, who had not only been indicted in U.S. courts for planning to kill American government employees but whom agents believed reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a key supplier of weapons to Syria and Iraq, to skate free.

You can, I’m sure, imagine what the reaction would be if this story had Trump’s administration rather than Obama’s secretly released Putin’s Middle East arms dealer?

“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” David Asher, an on-the-record source and Defense Department official charged with tracking Hezbollah’s worldwide criminal enterprise, told Politico. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.” (Read the whole thing.)

 

This is hardly surprising, considering what we already know President Obama was willing to do to help Iran.........(Snip)

 

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Mainstream media silence on Politico report that Obama allowed Hezbollah drug running to appease Iran

Meanwhile, Trump is vigorously going after Hezbollah’s criminal networks, particularly in Latin America.

William A. Jacobson   

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

 

So far there is near silence from the mainstream media about the blockbuster Politico Magazine investigative report on how the Obama administration from the top down interfered with U.S. law enforcement efforts to take down Hezbollah’s drug running of cocaine into the U.S. in order to facilitate the Iran nuclear deal.

I summarized the Politico findings in my post, Obama allowed Hezbollah cocaine running into U.S. in quest for Iran nuke deal.

* I cannot find any mentions of the Politico story in any of the major newspapers or networks (except for Fox News). The same people who endlessly repeat shoddy reporting by other mainstream outlets when it comes to anti-Trump conspiracy theories, don’t feel the need to report on the Politico story. My hunch is that they are devoting resources to try to question the Politico story.

They don’t know what to do because this reflects so badly on the person they spent 8 years defending and covering for. Obama sacrificed Americans addicted to and dying from cocaine in order to appease Iran. That should be on the front page of every major newspaper and on every major newscast, but it’s not.

 

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* Spent time at various times of the day yesterday looking for the MSM covering this story.

 

 

 

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Podcast: Hezbollah’s Narco-Terror Nexus in Latin America

Dec. 19 2017

 

The under-researched and under-reported partnership between Middle East terror groups and Latin American drug cartels is fast developing. Iranian-backed Hezbollah is leveraging its growing global network to launder huge amounts of money, traffic weapons, and engage in a long list of illicit activities that are increasingly overlapping with the work of Latin American narcos.

In Episode 3 of FDD’s podcast Foreign Podicy, host Cliff May talks with Latin America expert, Emanuele Ottolenghi, to discuss how Hezbollah is using its global terror network to connect the gap between Latin American drug cartels and the international markets of the Far East, the Middle East and Europe. Ottolenghi investigates and breaks down the illicit tactics used by the groups, and what the US should be doing to combat the convergence of narco-trafficking and jihadi-terrorism.

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House IT Aides Ran Car Dealership With Markings Of A Nefarious Money Laundering Operation

Luke Rosiak

Dec. 19 2017

The used car dealership known as CIA never seemed like an ordinary car dealership, with inventory, staff and expenses.

On its Facebook page, CIA’s “staff” were fake personalities such as “James Falls O’Brien,” whose photo was taken from a hairstyle model catalog, and “Jade Julia,” whose image came from a web page called “Beautiful Girls Wallpaper.”

If a customer showed up looking to buy a car from Cars International A, often referred to as CIA, Abid Awan — who was managing partner of the dealership while also earning $160,000 handling IT for House Democrats — would frequently simply go across the street to another dealership called AAA Motors and get one.

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Imran Awan and his family members were congressional IT aides who investigators said made unauthorized access to the House Democratic Caucus server thousands of times. At the same time as they worked for and could read all the emails of congressmen who sat on committees like Intelligence, Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs, they also ran a car dealership that took money from a Hezbollah-linked fugitive and whose financial books were indecipherable and business patterns bizarre, according to testimony in court records.

While Imran and Abid Awan ran their car dealership in Falls Church, Va. in the early part of the decade, Drug Enforcement Agency officials a few miles away in Chantilly were learning that the Iranian-linked terrorist group frequently deployed used car dealerships in the US to launder money and fund terrorism, according to an explosive new Politico expose.

The money that disappeared between the Awans’ dealership, some $7 million in congressional pay, the equipment suspected of disappearing from Congress under their watch, and their other side businesses — all while they displayed few signs of wealth and frequently haggled in court over small amounts of money — raise questions about whether the Awans might have been laundering money or sending it to a third party.  

 

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Forward to 2:17 mark

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The Iran Echo Chamber Smears Politico Magazine

Column: For exposing the administration's softball approach to Hezbollah

Matthew Continetti
December 22, 2017

(Snip)

 

Meyer is not an ideologue, not a partisan, not a quack. He worked for the Los Angeles Times, for NBC News, and for the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative before joining Politico as a senior investigative reporter. His Twitter feed contains plenty of criticisms of President Trump and congressional Republicans. And his story is solid. He explores different angles and gives his subjects fair comment. He's produced a classic example of the good journalism that our betters tell us we need more than ever.

Except our betters don't like it, not one bit, because it reflects poorly on the most significant (yet dubious and controversial) achievement of Barack Obama's second term. In a tactic familiar to opponents of the Iran deal, the criticism is aimed not at the facts behind Meyer's article but at Meyer himself. "It's a shabby neocon hit piece," says Valerie Plame's bestie Joe Cirincione. "A disgusting hit job by both the cabal of people with this agenda and by the reporter who paid lip service to the criticisms of this group," says Brian O'Toole, a "non-resident senior fellow" at the Atlantic Council. Neocon … cabal … I wonder whom these guys are referring to? (Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.)

"Non-fact based anti-Iran Deal propaganda," sneers former deputy national security adviser and creative writing expert Ben Rhodes. "The story is so manufactured out of thin air that it's hard to push back except to say that it's a figment of the imagination of two very flawed sources," says Tommy Vietor, who has a podcast. Note that Vietor is obviously wrong: the piece has far more than "two very flawed sources." Note as well that neither Rhodes nor Vietor ever actually bother to challenge those sources or the facts provided to Politico.

Vietor went on to tell Meyer over Twitter that Meyer's "on the record sources have undisclosed anti-Iran deal bias." And Ned Price, who worked for Rhodes, called the Politico article an "anti-Iran deal screed" based on sources with "undisclosed anti-Iran deal bias." For shame! Before we go any further, let me disclose my anti-Iran deal bias right now.

A Twitter lefty named Adam Khan expanded on these McCarthy-like observations, warning that if journalists "go out of their way to hide experts' links to donors, agenda, that should be a big red flag." Writers should know better than to quote the cabal of neocon donors with agendas, is his point.

 

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Sessions orders review of abandoned Hezbollah-linked drug prosecutions

Inquiry follows POLITICO report that potential cases languished amid Obama drive for Iran nuclear deal.

JOSH GERSTEIN

12/22/2017

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has ordered the Justice Department to dig into allegations in a POLITICO report that a series of potential drug prosecutions related to the pro-Iranian militant group Hezbollah were abandoned as the Obama administration pressed to strike a deal with Iran over its nuclear program.

Sessions indicated that he was troubled by allegations that Project Cassandra — the Drug Enforcement Administration's drive to target Hezbollah's foray into drug trafficking — ran into high-level roadblocks that stymied many of the cases agents wanted to bring as well as efforts to get suspects extradited from overseas to the U.S.

(Snip)

Justice Department officials declined to comment on who will conduct the review or any other details about the inquiry.

The deeply reported POLITICO story has unleashed furious pushback from Obama administration officials who have denied that the high-priority push to reach a nuclear pact with Tehran derailed any law enforcement operations.

However, Republicans and pro-Israel activists have jumped on the story as evidence that the Obama administration was so focused on the nuclear deal that it was willing to ignore other troublesome activity by the Iranian regime and its allies.

 

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Josh Meyer Gets an Echo Chamber Beat-Down

Politico reporter is punished for raising the curtain on Obama’s Hezbollah policy

Lee Smith

Dec. 27 2017

A week after Josh Meyer’s Politico expose,“The Secret Backstory Of How Obama Let Hezbollah Off the Hook,” former Obama officials are still berating Meyer for his 13,000-word article detailing how the Obama administration killed a nearly decade-long DEA effort to stem a global Hezbollah cocaine-smuggling-and-organized-crime ring to help secure its nuclear deal with Iran. “This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” former Defense Department analyst David Asher explained in the article. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”

(Snip)

In response, a Twitter mob of mid-level bureaucrats and former intelligence officers orchestrated in the usual fashion attacked Asher in tandem with the media echo chamber used to sell the Iran Deal, with former political operatives from the Obama White House supplying the usual talking points to their hatchet-men. Meyer’s “on the record sources have undisclosed anti-Iran deal bias,” tweeted former Obama speechwriter Tommy Vietor, who has remade himself as a podcast host. Meyer’s “entire piece,” tweeted Obama lieutenant and former CIA officer Ned Price, “is based on pure speculation by these ‘1 or 2 sources’ w undisclosed anti-Iran deal bias.”

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The case against Meyer’s article is preposterous on the face of it. Obama made reaching a nuclear deal with Iran, Hezbollah’s patron, his top second-term priority. To make this happen, Obama paid the Iranians hundreds of millions a month to stay in negotiations, provided them with billions in sanctions relief after the deal was struck, shipped $1.3 billion in cash to the IRGC on wooden pallets, and as Meyer reported in a previous article, freed Iranian agents who tried to ship weapons and other banned items from the US to Iran. Yet we are supposed to believe that, at the very same time, these same people, with these views, serving a president with these priorities, would allow the DEA to arrest major Hezbollah assets who were funding Iran’s “equities” in Syria, at a moment in which the Iran Deal hung in the balance? Why on earth would they do that–while continuing to service Iran and Hezbollah in every other way possible?

Not to take anything away from Meyer’s excellent reporting, and the work and time it took to build his 13,000-word expose, but perhaps the most shocking thing about his piece is that it took so long for a single journalist in Washington—and judging by Twitter, there are apparently thousands of them, tweeting the exact same approved takes in unison—to report and write it. Meyer’s sources have all offered copious public testimony before. Meyer’s larger thesis—Obama went easy on Hezbollah in pursuit of his nuclear deal with Iran—has been an established fact for several years. What Meyer’s article does is fill in the big picture with important details, like the names of the Hezbollah operatives the Obama White House let off, and what crimes they plotted against American citizens, allies, and interests before the administration let them walk.

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Tweet Of The Day

Chuck Ross‏ @ChuckRossDC

 

23: The number of times over the past day that CNN has mentioned the white box truck that obscured view of Trump golfing

0: For comparison, the number of times CNN has mentioned that Politico report on Obama admin's quashing of Hezbollah investigation.

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10:32 AM - 28 Dec 2017

 

Tweet of the day, cont’d

Scott Johnson

Dec. 29 2017

Scrolling through my Twitter feed this morning, I see that John’s designated Tweet of the Day yesterday has an afterlife on the day after. Thanks to the Drudge tweet below, we see that CNN is still on the case. The song remains the same. As for CNN’s noncoverage of Josh Meyer’s exposé of the Obama administration’s accommodation of Hezbollah, the silence remains the same. CNN’s silence, however, may be preferable to the “Echo-chamber beat-down.”

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Ex-DEA Agent Says Obama Admin. Lost ‘Gold Opportunity’ to ‘Crush’ Hezbollah

Nuclear negotiations with Iran sidelined operations against drug trafficking network

Natalie Johnson
January 11, 2018

The retired head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's special-operations division said on Wednesday the Obama administration squandered a chance to dismantle Hezbollah due in part to political motivations to clinch a nuclear deal with Iran.

Derek Maltz, who was in charge of a major law enforcement operation targeting Hezbollah's trafficking of cocaine, said the United States cannot again succumb to political distractions that allow the Iranian-backed terrorist to continue its narcoterrorism campaign.

 

(Snip)

Maltz echoed this sentiment on Wednesday, telling lawmakers the United States needs better interagency cooperation to confront Hezbollah's terrorism ambitions and the transnational criminal organizations that generate tens of millions of dollars for the Iranian-backed group.

"Sadly, 16 years after 9/11, we're still talking about information sharing. It's a disaster," he testified. "If terrorists are turning to criminal networks for their funding, how can we have a system where the terrorist investigators and the intelligence community and others are not communicating properly with the law enforcement agencies?"

He said the Trump administration needs to identify who in the U.S. government is responsible for bringing together federal, state, and local agencies under an interagency task force to combat narcoterrorism.

 

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