Another Example of the Obama Admin’s Dishonest Campaign to Sell Iran Nuke Deal Fred Fleitz
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Over the last few months, a lot of new information has come out on how the Obama White House misled the American public, Congress and the news media about the nuclear deal with Iran before Congress voted on the agreement last September.
According to a May 5, 2016 New York Times profile of National Security Council Adviser Ben Rhodes, the Obama administration used false narratives to promote the nuclear deal and conducted a campaign to manipulate and mislead journalists as part of a media “echo chamber.”
Several liberal organizations helped facilitate this echo chamber. One of the most notorious was the far-left Ploughshares Fund which sought and received funding from liberal philanthropist George Soros. This included an April 2015 request for $750,000 to use mainstream media to counter opponents of the nuclear deal and parrot White House talking points.
Congressman Mike Pompeo (R-KS) has called for an investigation on whether large payments by Ploughshares to National Public Radio slanted NPR’s coverage of the nuclear deal and kept congressmen who opposed the agreement off the air.
The latest disclosure on how Ploughshares funding may still be distorting the debate over the nuclear deal concerns a Washington Post contributor.
According to an August 16, 2016 Washington Free Beacon by Adam Kredo, Allen Weiner, a Standord law professor and Ploughshares-funded expert, recently penned a Washington Postop-ed defending the nuclear deal but the Post failed to mention that he is on the payroll of the Ploughshares Fund. According to Kredo, Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (where Weiner acts as a senior lecturer), received $100,000 from Ploughshares in 2015. Weiner received a $15,000 payment from Ploughshares for a 2007 paper.
In an email to Kredo, Weiner denied speaking to anyone at Ploughshares about the nuclear deal or knowing the group’s position on the agreement. Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt disputed Kredo’s claim that Weiner is on the Ploughshares “payroll” and said he saw no conflicts of interest.
However, on August 11, 2016, the Washington Post ran an op-ed co-authored by Weiner that defended a $400 million payment to free four U.S. prisoners held by Iran as “American diplomacy at its finest.” Many experts believe this payment amounted to ransom and have harshly criticized the Obama administration for concealing it from Congress.
The $400 million was secretly flown to Tehran from Geneva in an unmarked plane. The payment was made in small denominations of euros and Swiss francs. The plane transporting the American prisoners was not allowed to take off until after the planeload of cash landed. Iran says this was a ransom payment. The Justice Department opposed the timing of this payment because it looked like ransom. Weiner ignored these facts and repeated the absurd Obama administration position that this was not a ransom payment but represented America repaying an old debt to Iran.
With the Obama administration under fire for the controversial $400 million it paid to Iran, I have no doubt someone recruited Weiner as part of its Iran deal echo chamber to draft hisWashington Post op-ed defending its dubious rationale for this payment. This op-ed did not appear out of thin air.
Was Weiner on the Ploughshares “payroll” to promote the Iran deal? There’s no evidence of this (at least yet) and he denies it. However, given the unusual timing of his piece mimicking administration talking points that the $400 million was not a ransom payment, it seems likely Weiner is part of the White House media echo chamber to mislead the American people and Congress about the Iran deal.
Weiner’s article also suggests this echo chamber is still being used to generate false narratives for the White House to defend the nuclear deal. Further investigation by journalists may prove that the Ploughshares Fund is still funding these distortions.
Fred Fleitz writes for the Center for Security Policy.
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