BREAKING: Calls For Obama's Immediate Arrest After What He Was Just Caught Doing With Iranian
hates promote Politico which is pretty bad most the time but they had a
remarkable piece a couple of days ago we will concede that and it explained how
the Obama administration's justice and State Department's deliberately undercut
efforts to bring down a billion-dollar drug cartel linked to Hezbollah the
terror group it all happened in secret apparently with the goal of getting a
nuclear deal with Iran how did this happen
Eli Lake is a columnist at Bloomberg he's written about national security and
foreign policy for many years and joins us now
Eli first question is this story from your reporting essentially true well it
fits a pattern with what I would call the sort of increasing price of the Iran
deal which is that we keep learning later right of other concessions that
were made that you know we're not part of the original explanation of that
nuclear deal to the American public and I've also heard a more general concern
that as a general rule the Obama administration went softer on you know
lots of kind of Iran's regional predations but the specifics of this
particular story I think you know I know the reporter Josh Meyer I think it's
it's solid and it's one thing to say look you know we're not gonna hassle
Iranian diplomats or we're gonna look the other way at nonsense going on in
Lebanon but Hezbollah teaming up with the Zetas the Mexican drug cartel to
import tons of cocaine into the United States in the middle of a drug epidemic
seems like a pretty big thing to overlook it's not just that and you're
right that is a big deal from a drug enforcement perspective yeah it's also
in a listen stream of income to the main arm of Iran's foreign policy if you can
explain to our viewers quickly and you didn't read the piece yeah well what it
would it basically is that there was a two way operation it laundered money
back to Hezbollah but it also was a drug trafficking network but one of the
things that it means is also it's a way for Hezbollah to sort of have a revenue
stream to then support their activities in Syria in Iraq and other places in the
region where they're causing a lot of mayhem on Iran's behalf so there's no
question that the Obama people knew this was going on and overlooked it because
they felt the Iran deal was so important is there any way I knew you're probably
not a fan of the Iran deal but is there any way do you think ethically to
justify that decision well there are decisions that are made all the time
between law enforcement and intelligence gathering and that is a real thing and
you can I think proponents of the deal would say that it's very important to do
what you can to try to disarm as much as you can for the 10 to 15 years that the
Iran deal is lasts my issue in particular is that all of these sorts of
concessions that the Obama administration made should have been
told to the American people up front when Congress was voting on it in 2015
and they were selling it to the American people is there any indication that
members of Congress knew that this was going on the DEA was being prevented
from interdicting drug trafficking on behalf of it well that I did a little
bit of reporting on and I can tell you that Republican members are shocked at
this point there has been some pushback from Obama alumni but they haven't
really addressed the central claims of the article and the pushback has
consisted of they've consisted of saying while the on-the-record sources are
affiliated with bias think tanks but that's I think pretty weak yeah I mean
the only record source is also when one of them was in this task force who was
telling his story right there were anonymous sources as well so it was sort
of you know if you can't if you can't dispute the facts that you know dispute
that that's always the way you like thank you for that thank you David
Jeffrey is a former State Department official he advised Barack Obama's
presidential campaigns on questions of foreign policy and he joins us tonight
so David 60,000 people died last year of drug ADIZ I think we're sort of beyond
the point we can pretend that there's not a massive historic drug crisis going
on in America and yet the Obama administration as that crisis was
ramping up in effect allowed tons of narcotics to come into the country
knowingly that seems jaw-dropping to me this is really a story about terrorism
and about our own Iran policy we can agree on a couple things first of all
that Hezbollah does support terrorism that Hezbollah is an arm of Iran and it
carries out Iran's anti-american anti-western agenda so we should be
using law enforcement to confront Hezbollah and we have been doing that
this story suggests however that the Obama administration pulled back on a
major law enforcement investigation in order to support the Iran deal
is troubling if true however this story is thinly supported in Eli Lake noted
some of the ways in which it's thinly supported it's basically based on two
former DEA agents who have an agenda there's I have a contact he's just left
the Treasury Department last summer he says that this is a disgusting hit job
by a cabal of people with an agenda okay so there are two sides to this story
well that's not a side actually that's an ad hominem attack on the reporting
without offering countervailing evidence let me stipulate that all stories in
Washington come with an agenda explicit or not so of course there are agendas
this comes what you're not but is he saying that it's untrue that the Obama
people knew that Hezbollah was partnering with a Mexican drug cartel
two important by the tone into the United States and launder terror money
they didn't know that correct if you look at his tweets he is saying it's not
true that the interagency process which involves the intelligence community
State Department Treasury folks like him who were on the sanctions policy group
were monitoring this very closely and they did not agree that the Obama
administration suddenly changed its policy now if they want about my
administration did that is problematic but the problem is this fifty page plus
story with lots of details is really just based on the the the the testimony
of just two people and that's problematic so it needs further
investigation well actually you would date I didn't entire Obama I don't know
that that's true and I'm not a dating the entire Obama administration the show
is not long enough to do that enjoy it I'm merely saying that this piece
purportedly is based on interviews with dozens of people it says directly
involved of this there's an on-the-record piece of written testimony
before Congress from Obama Treasury official saying that a specific DEA
operation Kassandra meant to interdict cocaine
shipments here was stymied on purpose so is that true or not it sounds like it is
true how there are plenty of quotes in the article that also that from people
in the Obama administration who said no that's not true that that's at the Obama
ministration did not sorry I read the piece carefully
the White House did not attempt to curb the DEA led
efforts against Hezbollah because of the Iran deal that's a direct quote from the
artifice of the Iran deal that I'm what gret there's not one line in that piece
that says the facts are not true it's a question of motive so they're saying you
know look this is complex and by the way there's some truth in this these are
complexes eli just noted there's often a debate between the Intel people and the
law enforcement people I get it there a lot of priorities at stake but no part
of that piece does it say that the administration didn't lean on DEA DEA to
stop being so aggressive with Hezbollah no one denies that we got an important
thing which is there were a lot of different objectives at work here and
there was another objective which was to reach the wrong deal in order to curb
Iran's effort to develop nuclear weapons that was equally important we should
have been doing both and I would hope that we were able to do both this report
suggests we weren't but it is again based on just a couple of people's
testimony no it's it's not actually it's based again on the testimony firsthand
of dozens of people but let's get to the point the deal I made which is that
Congress voted on this had no idea this was going on so how exactly does that
work why should the democratically elected Congress the United States whose
constitutional duty it is to approve or disapprove a deal like this why
shouldn't they have all the facts before doing that why did the administration
lie to them I don't understand well Congress definitely should have had
all of the facts there they're plenty there's plenty of legislation in
Congress right now that is anti has blood that would help with the effort to
confront Hezbollah and Congress has the opportunity now based on these facts and
others to vote in favor of that what the deal is done okay first of all all of
those narcotics came into this country and again 60,000 people died last year
so you can't argue that it's not shaking American society to its foundations drug
addiction and it is and this is part of the problem but more than that the Iran
deal is in place and D certifying it undoing it pulling out if it has all
kinds of other ramifications it's like Obamacare once you're in it's kind of
hard to get out actually so why didn't Congress know before
approving this the whole story we don't know it
intelligent the intelligence committees on Congress they get in they get
classified information and they were probably getting some of this
information uh-huh so Treasury called over and said but
just so you know in order to kind of sweeten the deal we're letting Hezbollah
which we've designated a terror organization to partner with the Zetas
in the Mexican civil drug war import tons of cocaine into the country hope
you're cool with that Tucker you're also overlooking the fact that some of this
was public knowledge the people who were arrested one of the people is a
hezbollah person in who was arrested in Prague that was public information so
there was some information that was publicly out there about wasn't what
wasn't public is that the UM parts of the US government tried to extradite
that Hezbollah official from Prague and were stymied in their efforts by the
Obama administration which didn't want to rock the boat with Iran I mean that's
a perfect example as outlined in the piece they let the guy sit there and now
he's back in Beirut selling arms to people who shouldn't have them that's
the position this article takes we don't know if that's true or not but I also
want to talk about something else the Trump administration the Trump
administration has not changed the policy towards Hezbollah one iota for
instance Trump administration has looked the other way as Hezbollah linked
militias in Iraq have taken back territory in fact some of them are using
u.s. arms that were supplied to the Iraqi army and the Iraqi army gave it to
the hostages job' which is basically it has been linked one Alysha one of the
unit easily erupted or are you upset about that as well I think the Iraq war
empowered Iran and Hezbollah its client its client yes I do we agree about that
right but I guess the point I'm making is you can debate Hezbollah and their
role in the world stage you can't debate it's a bad idea to allow a terror group
to import cocaine into your country that's all I'm saying we both agree on
that okay David a very thank you thank you
you
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét