According to a report published Monday by Politico, the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration—specifically, the secret “side deals”—are far worse than anyone imagined.
The report states, in part:
When President Barack Obama announced the “one-time gesture” of releasing Iranian-born prisoners who “were not charged with terrorism or any violent offenses” last year, his administration presented the move as a modest trade-off for the greater good of the Iran nuclear agreement and Tehran’s pledge to free five Americans.
“Iran had a significantly higher number of individuals, of course, at the beginning of this negotiation that they would have liked to have seen released,” one senior Obama administration official told reporters in a background briefing arranged by the White House, adding that “we were able to winnow that down to these seven individuals, six of whom are Iranian-Americans.”
But Obama, the senior official and other administration representatives weren’t telling the whole story on Jan. 17, 2016, in their highly choreographed rollout of the prisoner swap and simultaneous implementation of the six-party nuclear deal …
In reality, the Obama administration was handing over high-level operatives with insider knowledge that could have been crucial to efforts to hamper nuclear proliferation, and at the same time, hamstringing its own efforts to prevent the spread of technology used in the construction of weapons of mass destruction. As the report states, “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.”
The report suggests the deal was a wink-and-nod arrangement with Iran that encouraged the Islamic Republic to continue flouting international law. Not only that, but it creates an even greater threat to U.S. national security. U.S. prosecutors and FBI investigators were kept in the dark about the matter, which has only exacerbated the problem:
The lack of input also meant that negotiators were making decisions without fully understanding how the releases would impact the broader and interconnected matrix of U.S. investigations.
At the time, those investigations were providing U.S. officials with a road map of how, exactly, Tehran was clandestinely building its nuclear and ballistic missile programs and maintaining its military with the unwitting assistance of so many U.S. weapons parts and technology companies. The cases were also providing key operational details of how the Iranian procurement networks operate, and who in Tehran was calling the shots.
Even the Obama administration’s claim that those who were released had been in no way involved in terrorism or proliferation activities was false. In fact, the deal “has erased literally years—many years—of hard work, and important cases that can be used to build toward other cases and even bigger players in Iran’s nuclear and conventional weapons programs,” one official told Politico.
Click here to read the entire report. {eoa}
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