RUTHFULLY YOURS

In January 2016, the Obama administration released seven Iranian-born prisoners in what President Barack Obama called a “one-time” “humanitarian gesture” intended to sweeten the nuclear deal hammered out between Washington, D.C., and Tehran. The prisoners — who Josh Earnest insisted were guilty only of “sanctions violations or violations of the trade embargo” — were exchanged for five Americans, unjustly held by Iran since as early as 2011. In fact, some of the Iranian prisoners were national-security threats, and it wasn’t a straight prisoner swap: The Wall Street Journal revealed that on the day of the exchange the U.S. flew $400 million in cash on an unmarked cargo plane to Iran.

When it came to its negotiations with Iran, duplicity was the hallmark of the previous administration’s public statements. (Sanctimonious preening was a close second.) But supporters assured skeptics that the administration was acting in the country’s best national-security interests. Now comes a new bombshell investigation that shows the lengths to which the previous administration went to secure Iranian cooperation, even when it meant putting American security at risk.

According to an investigation by Politico, in addition to the prisoner release, the Justice Department quietly “dropped charges and international arrest warrants against 14 other men, all of them fugitives.” Several of them were wanted for alleged roles in helping to funnel materiel to Iran-backed terror outfits, such as Hezbollah, or for participating in the global network to procure components for Iran’s nuclear program. One was believed to have helped supply Shiite militias in Iraq with a particularly deadly type of IED — one that killed “hundreds” of American troops. Furthermore:

Justice and State Department officials denied or delayed requests from prosecutors and agents to lure some key Iranian fugitives to friendly countries so they could be arrested. Similarly, Justice and State, at times in consultation with the White House, slowed down efforts to extradite some suspects already in custody overseas, according to current and former officials and others involved in the counterproliferation effort. And as far back as the fall of 2014, Obama administration officials began slow-walking some significant investigations and prosecutions of Iranian procurement networks operating in the U.S.

As Politico says, “through action in some cases and inaction in others, the White House derailed its own much-touted National Counterproliferation Initiative at a time when it was making unprecedented headway in thwarting Iran’s proliferation networks.”

Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson certified that Iran was compliant with its commitments under the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, known more formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). However, this is only because of all the concessions that the Obama administration had made, which lowered the bar for Iran’s technical compliance to an absurdly low level. Indeed, Barack Obama’s concessions to the Iran regime, which he offered in order to secure Iran’s agreement on the terms of the disastrous JCPOA, seem to have no bounds. The result is that Iran is marching ahead with perfecting key elements of a full nuclear weapons program, while already receiving many of the benefits of sanctions relief afforded by the JCPOA. And now evidence has surfaced that the Obama administration not only paid a ransom for the release of American citizens imprisoned unlawfully by the Iranian regime as the JCPOA was being implemented. According to an April 24th investigatory report by Politico, the Obama administration also agreed, as part of a prison swap, to release seven Iranian-born prisoners from U.S. custody, at least some of whom could well go back to helping the Iranian regime procure components for its nuclear weapons program.

Moreover, the Politico report found that the administration dropped charges and international arrest warrants against 14 fugitives. Obama Justice and State Department officials, at times after consultations with the White House, reportedly slowed down the extradition process for some fugitives who were in custody abroad. And the administration failed to vigorously go after Iranian procurement networks in the United States, while thwarting career law enforcement officials’ efforts to lure their targets to international destinations where they could be readily arrested.

In short, senior Obama administration officials delivered a major blow to the painstaking work of counter-proliferation task forces that had been trying for years to uncover and break up Iran’s intricate procurement networks supporting its nuclear arms program.

“A lot of people were furious; they had cases in the pipeline for months, in some cases years, and then, all of a sudden, they were gone — all because they were trying to sell the nuke deal,” a former Department of Commerce counter-proliferation agent was quoted by Politico as saying.

And from Obama on down, the small group of officials involved in brokering the trade-offs leading to the nuclear deal misled the American people in the process.

For example, the Obama administration downplayed its release of the Iranian-born prisoners, whom were referred to benignly as “civilians” and “businessmen.” President Obama himself described the prisoner swap with the Iranian regime as “a reciprocal humanitarian gesture.” His Press Secretary Josh Earnest represented that the released prisoners had been caught up in technical sanctions or trade embargo violations – what Earnest referred to as “nonviolent crimes.” In fact, according to the Politico report, “some of them were accused by Obama’s own Justice Department of posing threats to national security. Three allegedly were part of an illegal procurement network supplying Iran with U.S.-made microelectronics with applications in surface-to-air and cruise missiles like the kind Tehran test-fired recently, prompting a still-escalating exchange of threats with the Trump administration.”