April 25, 2017

Obama-supporting webzine posts a story extremely critical of Obama. Okay, what the hell is going on?

An "admission against interest" is when a suspect or defendant admits something in court that hurts their case.  It's given special weight by prosecutors because logically, one wouldn't admit something damaging unless they were trying to conceal something even more damaging.

The story at this link is by a commercial left-wing blog, Politico.  It's a bombshell because it excoriates the Obama administration for something Obama and Kerry and Hillary and every single mainstream media organ praised as one of their most FANTASTIC, AMAZING achievements.

Unless you've read Politico for years, you won't realize how totally bizarre this is.  It's as strange as if Vladimir Putin were to denounce communism.  As strange as if Chuck Schumer were to criticize Nancy Pelosi.  As unexpected as Lois Lerner giving a straight answer.  Totally unprecedented.

Here's the gist--but you really need to click the link to see it for yourself:

The headline is "Obama's hidden Iran deal giveaway."  Sub-head is
By dropping charges against major arms targets, the administration infuriated Justice Department officials — and undermined its own counterproliferation task forces. 
And keep in mind, this is from an Obama-loving website, one that has never criticized a single action by a Democrat!

Short version:  Obama's Justice Department had charged 20 Iranians or Iranian-Americans with helping Iran buy various prohibited items that could be used in making nuclear weapons or in ballistic missiles.  Some were in jail in the U.S. but most the the 20 were fugitives, and the DOJ had issued international warrants for their arrest.

To convince the Iranian government to make the agreement he wanted so badly, Obama announced that the U.S. was releasing Iranian-born prisoners who “were not charged with terrorism or any violent offenses.”
 
But as with so much that Obama wanted to do, the president and his representatives weren’t telling the whole story.  In his Sunday morning address to the American people Obama described the seven men he freed as “civilians.”  A senior official described them as businessmen convicted of or awaiting trial for mere “sanctions-related offenses, violations of the trade embargo.”

In reality, 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. 

But in addition, in a series of unpublicized court filings,the Justice Department dropped charges and international arrest warrants against 14 other men, all of them fugitives. The administration didn’t disclose their names or what they were accused of doing, but used an unattributed, 152-word statement to note that the U.S. “also removed any Interpol red notices and dismissed any charges against 14 Iranians for whom it was assessed that extradition requests were unlikely to be successful.”

One of the fugitives, Behrouz Dolatzadeh, was charged with conspiring to buy thousands of U.S.-made assault rifles and illegally import them into Iran.
 The biggest fish, though, was Seyed Abolfazl Shahab Jamili, who had been charged with being part of a conspiracy that from 2005 to 2012 procured thousands of parts with nuclear applications for Iran via China. That included hundreds of U.S.-made sensors for the uranium enrichment centrifuges in Iran whose progress had prompted the nuclear deal talks in the first place.

When federal prosecutors and agents learned the true extent of the releases, many were shocked and angry. Some had spent years, if not decades, working to penetrate the global proliferation networks that allowed Iranian arms traders both to obtain crucial materials for Tehran’s illicit nuclear and ballistic missile programs and, in some cases, to provide dangerous materials to other countries.

In its determination to win support for the nuclear deal and prisoner swap from Tehran — and from Congress and the American people — the Obama administration did a lot more than just downplay the threats posed by the men it let off the hook, according to POLITICO’s findings.
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. In addition, the POLITICO investigation found that 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. These previously undisclosed findings are based on interviews with key participants at all levels of government and an extensive review of court records and other documents.

“Clearly, there was an embargo on any Iranian cases,” according to the former federal supervisor.
“Of course it pissed people off, but it’s more significant that these guys were freed, and that people were killed because of the actions of one of them,” the supervisor added, in reference to Ravan and the IED network.

The saga of how the Obama administration threw a monkey wrench into its own Justice Department-led counterproliferation effort continues to play out almost entirely out of public view, largely because of the highly secretive nature of the cases and the negotiations that affected them.
That may be about to change, as the Trump administration and both chambers of Congress have pledged to crack down on Tehran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Last Wednesday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced a government-wide review of U.S. policy toward Iran in the face of “alarming and ongoing provocations that export terror and violence, destabilizing more than one country at a time.”
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Why in the world would Politico report something so damaging to Obama and the Democrats whose support was so crucial to his ability to pass so much of his agenda? 

It wasn't because they were out of stories and needed something to fill the internet.  Instead the most likely reason is that with a new Attorney-general and new president, the few honest people in Justice started coming forward to tell what had been happening.  On learning about that, the Dems realized they couldn't keep this story hidden much longer.

When a damaging story is about to break, standard procedure is to have a friendly outlet break it.  This allows other Dem outlets to delay a couple of days and then minimize the story by calling it "old news."  Also, by breaking the story first the Dems prevent Trump and Sessions from claiming a win, since the public will think it was the honest, non-partisan reporters at Politico who uncovered the story.

Strange times indeed.

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