Pirate's Cove

Yesterday, we found out that the Obama DOJ and high levels of the DEA spiked a DEA investigation into a big opioid maker. Now we find, via Politico (glad they can tell us this stuff now), that the Obama administration spiked another investigation involving the DEA, along with other agencies. Ed Morrissey writes

Did the current administration “collude” with Russia? So far no evidence at all has emerged to support that hypothesis, but Politico’s Josh Meyer digs deep into another curious set of circumstances in the Obama White House and its own operations with a foreign power. Perhaps the media will start asking whether the previous administration colluded with Iran to let terrorists and drug dealers go free in order to score one of the worst deals ever in international relations.

Before Barack Obama decided to pursue the nuclear deal with Iran, the DEA had a major operation called Project Cassandra. This operation had identified Hezbollah as a major supplier of cocaine to the US and other countries, along with its usual terrorist activities on behalf of its sponsors in Tehran. The DEA and FBI had built criminal cases against major players in Hezbollah’s drug and arms networks, succeeding in getting sealed indictments and finding witnesses for prosecution.

It was pretty much a slam dunk case. But, Obama wanted his deal, regardless of how much it helped Iran and Hezzbollah

(Politico) One Obama-era Treasury official, Katherine Bauer, in little-noticed written testimony presented last February to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, acknowledged that “under the Obama administration … these [Hezbollah-related] investigations were tamped down for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.”

As a result, some Hezbollah operatives were not pursued via arrests, indictments, or Treasury designations that would have blocked their access to U.S. financial markets, according to Bauer, a career Treasury official, who served briefly in its Office of Terrorist Financing as a senior policy adviser for Iran before leaving in late 2015. And other “Hezbollah facilitators” arrested in France, Colombia, Lithuania have not been extradited — or indicted — in the U.S., she wrote. …

The investigations just went away, in order to protect Obama’s buddies in Tehran and his desperately wanted deal. which, if you remember, simply kicked Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions down the road for around 10 years.

And this was happening here in the United States, as well

In Philadelphia, the FBI-led task force had spent two years bolstering its case claiming that Safieddine had overseen an effort to purchase 1,200 military-grade assault rifles bound for Lebanon, with the help of Kelly and the special narcoterrorism prosecutors in New York.

Now, they had two key eyewitnesses. One would identify Safieddine as the Hezbollah official sitting behind a smoked-glass barricade who approved the assault weapons deal. And an agent and prosecutor had flown to a remote Asian hotel and spent four days persuading another eyewitness to testify about Safieddine’s role in an even bigger weapons and drugs conspiracy, multiple former law enforcement officials confirmed to POLITICO.

Convinced they had a strong case, the New York prosecutors sent a formal prosecution request to senior Justice Department lawyers in Washington, as required in such high-profile cases. The Justice Department rejected it, and the FBI and DEA agents were never told why, those former officials said.

Hezbollah was and is a terrorist organization, backed by Iran. The Obama administration spiked the investigation. Ed Morrissey wraps up with “The politicization of the DoJ to allow terrorists to operate unfettered in the US is nothing short of unconscionable. We’ve allowed ourselves to get distracted by the Russia story long enough. It’s long past time for Congress to take a very hard look at the Iran deal and the Obama administration’s operations in support of it.” He’s right. Nothing is coming from these Russia Russia Russia investigations in terms of the central premise (based on a fake document), that team Trump colluded with Russia (which wouldn’t be a crime in the first place), yet, we keep learning more and more about the bad actions of the Obama administration, things the media did not want to investigate during Obama’s time in office.

Crossed at Right Wing News.