Politico: "Obama's Hidden Iran Giveaway"

Note this is Politico, a fake news outlet that cheers on Democrats, not, say, WND.

When Politico is giving their investigatory piece that headline, you know it's bad -- and you know it's probably worse than they're letting on, or worse than they've yet discovered.

Maybe bookmark the piece for reading tonight -- it's very long and detailed. I'll excerpt some stuff but this is just a little bit of it.

Obama's Hidden Iran Giveaway

By dropping charges against major arms targets, the administration infuriated Justice Department officials -- and undermined its own counterproliferation task forces.

By JOSH MEYER 04/24/17 05:00 AM EDT

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.

At the time, the Obama Administration crowed that they had "winnowed" Iran's additional request for more released prisoners down to these harmless seven.

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, according to a POLITICO investigation.

In his Sunday morning address to the American people, Obama portrayed the seven men he freed as "civilians." The 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, prompting a still-escalating exchange of threats with the Trump administration. Another was serving an eight-year sentence for conspiring to supply Iran with satellite technology and hardware. As part of the deal, U.S. officials even dropped their demand for $10 million that a jury said the aerospace engineer illegally received from Tehran.

And 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, noting only in an unattributed, 152-word statement about the swap 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"

Three of the fugitives allegedly sought to lease Boeing aircraft for an Iranian airline that authorities say had supported Hezbollah, the U.S.-designated terrorist organization. A fourth, Behrouz Dolatzadeh, was charged with conspiring to buy thousands of U.S.-made assault rifles and illegally import them into Iran.

A fifth, Amin Ravan, was charged with smuggling U.S. military antennas to Hong Kong and Singapore for use in Iran. U.S. authorities also believe he was part of a procurement network providing Iran with high-tech components for an especially deadly type of IED used by Shiite militias to kill hundreds of American troops in Iraq.

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.

And while this was going on, the Administration was putting DOJ investigations into both new and old Iranian or Iran-affiliated targets into slowdown, throwing sand in the gears at every turn.

That's all I can quote. Politico even includes a fact check at the end of the piece comparing Obama's claims about these seven (actually 21) "civilians" (actually spies and illegal arms smugglers) that he released.

Basically, Obama released the Rosenbergs in exchange for a promise to not build a nuclear bomb for ten years -- just continue doing all the research, testing, and procurement to build a bomb in ten years.

Oh, and then he gave the country the atomic secrets were stolen for $150 billion as seed money for their own Iranian Manhattan Project.

posted by Ace at 12:48 PM

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