OBAMA GAVE FREE PASS TO HEZBOLLAH’S DRUG OPERATIONS IN U.S., KILLED INVESTIGATIONS TO INSURE IRAN DEAL STAYED ON TRACK

OBAMA GAVE FREE PASS TO HEZBOLLAH’S DRUG OPERATIONS IN U.S., KILLED INVESTIGATIONS TO INSURE IRAN DEAL STAYED ON TRACK
BY ROBERT SPENCER
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
 

“Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against
them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the
United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer
death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under
this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding
any office under the United States.” (U.S. Code 2381)


In a sane political environment, Barack Obama would be tried for treason.

“The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook,” by Josh Meyer, Politico, December 17, 2017:

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.
They followed cocaine shipments, tracked a river of dirty cash, and
traced what they believed to be 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.
The Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and
other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as
Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly
laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a
U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force. And the State
Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries
where they could be arrested.
“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” said
David Asher, who helped establish and oversee Project Cassandra as a
Defense Department illicit finance analyst. “They serially ripped apart
this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it
was done from the top down.”
The untold story of Project Cassandra illustrates the immense
difficulty in mapping and countering illicit networks in an age where
global terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime have merged, but
also the extent to which competing agendas among government agencies —
and shifting priorities at the highest levels — can set back years of
progress.
And while the pursuit may be shadowed in secrecy, from Latin American
luxury hotels to car parks in Africa to the banks and battlefields of
the Middle East, the impact is not: In this case, multi-ton loads of
cocaine entering the United States, and hundreds of millions of dollars
going to a U.S.-designated terrorist organization with vast reach.
Obama had entered office in 2009 promising to improve relations with
Iran as part of a broader rapprochement with the Muslim world. On the
campaign trail, he had asserted repeatedly that the Bush
administration’s policy of pressuring Iran to stop its illicit nuclear
program wasn’t working, and that he would reach out to Tehran to reduce
tensions.
The man who would become Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser and
then CIA director, John Brennan, went further. He recommended in a
policy paper that “the next president has the opportunity to set a new
course for relations between the two countries” through not only a
direct dialogue, but “greater assimilation of Hezbollah into Lebanon’s
political system.”
By May 2010, Brennan, then assistant to the president for homeland
security and counterterrorism, confirmed in a speech that the
administration was looking for ways to build up “moderate elements”
within Hezbollah.
“Hezbollah is a very interesting organization,” Brennan told a
Washington conference, saying it had evolved from “purely a terrorist
organization” to a militia and, ultimately, a political party with
representatives in the Lebanese Parliament and Cabinet, according to a
Reuters report.
“There is certainly the elements of Hezbollah that are truly a
concern to us what they’re doing,” Brennan said. “And what we need to do
is to find ways to diminish their influence within the organization and
to try to build up the more moderate elements.”
In practice, the administration’s willingness to envision a new role
for Hezbollah in the Middle East, combined with its desire for a
negotiated settlement to Iran’s nuclear program, translated into a
reluctance to move aggressively against the top Hezbollah operatives,
according to Project Cassandra members and others.
Lebanese arms dealer Ali Fayad, a suspected top Hezbollah operative
whom agents believed reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a
key supplier of weapons to Syria and Iraq, was arrested in Prague in the
spring of 2014. But for the nearly two years Fayad was in custody, top
Obama administration officials declined to apply serious pressure on the
Czech government to extradite him to the United States, even as Putin
was lobbying aggressively against it….
Asher, for one, said Obama administration officials expressed
concerns to him about alienating Tehran before, during and after the
Iran nuclear deal negotiations. This was, he said, part of an effort to
“defang, defund and undermine the investigations that were involving
Iran and Hezbollah,” he said.
“The closer we got to the [Iran deal], the more these activities went
away,” Asher said. “So much of the capability, whether it was special
operations, whether it was law enforcement, whether it was [Treasury]
designations — even the capacity, the personnel assigned to this mission
— it was assiduously drained, almost to the last drop, by the end of
the Obama administration.”…

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