Trump Aides Reportedly Hired Spy Firm to Find ‘Dirt’ on Obama Officials Who Negotiated Iran Deal
According to a stunning new report from the Guardian, the current White House’s campaign to sabotage the Iran deal extended beyond President Donald Trump’s public rebukes of it.
Per the Observer:
Aides to Donald Trump, the US president, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the Observer can reveal.
Those aides reportedly reached out to private investigators in May, 2017 to seek out “dirt” on Ben Rhodes — a top Obama national security adviser — “as part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the deal.”
The campaign also targeted Colin Kahl, a former deputy assistant to Obama. Rhodes was chief salesman of the Iran deal when he served in the Obama administration, and in the Trump era has been a consistent defender of the deal.
According to the Observer, private investigators were instructed to search out dirt on those Obama officials’ personal lives:
According to incendiary documents seen by the Observer, investigators contracted by the private intelligence agency were told to dig into the personal lives and political careers of Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, and Kahl, a national security adviser to the former vice-president Joe Biden. Among other things they were looking at personal relationships, any involvement with Iran-friendly lobbyists, and if they had benefited personally or politically from the peace deal.
This bombshell comes ahead of Trump’s May 12 deadline to decide whether to leave the 2015 deal and reimpose sanctions on Iran.
Read the full report here.
[image via screengrab]
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