The US president versus the US 2

To the extent that there is a deal of sorts between the United States and Iran, it is against the interests of the United States.

To the extent that the Iranian regime acknowledges any such deal, it is only to get sanctions lifted so it can get on with becoming a rich, formidable, aggressive power armed with nuclear weapons.

President Obama must know this. And he persistently and passionately does all he can to help the Iranian regime get its way.

Now it emerges that he has used the apparatus of the state to spy on Congressmen opposed to the deal.

The information emerges because he has had it leaked. He instructed his officials to tell the Wall Street Journal that the National Security Agency took this illegal action.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the NSA spied on Israelis, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, and US citizens with whom they were in communication.

Caroline Glick writes at Front Page:

According to the Journal report, to advance its diplomatic opening to Iran, the administration has knowingly and deliberately spied on both law-abiding US citizens who posed no risk to US national security and on US lawmakers engaged in their lawful, constitutional duties.

As the criminal activity was characterized by the report, to protect Obama’s nuclear talks with the Iranians, Netanyahu was marked as a top intelligence target for the NSA. The NSA monitored all of his communications and all communications of his senior officials – most notably Ambassador Ron Dermer. …

The picture painted by the Journal article is of an administration that made massive, continuous and deliberate use of intercepted conversations between lawmakers and private citizens with Israeli officials.

Consider the administration’s indignant fury when news broke on January 21 of last year that the Republican congressional leaders Sen. Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner had invited Netanyahu to address the joint Houses about the dangers of the Iran nuclear deal.

Obama and his advisers insisted that they were blindsided by the news. Yet … [as] we now know that the NSA was monitoring all of Dermer’s communications – including his communications with US lawmakers – it appears to follow that NSA intercepted Boehner’s call to Dermer.

According to the Journal, the White House’s demand for intelligence on Israel was so intense that the NSA was transferring transcripts of intercepted calls within six hours of their interception.

From these intercepted communications, the administration learned Israel’s pitch for Democratic lawmakers in its efforts to convince them to oppose the deal. …

Israeli officials asked the wavering lawmakers, “How can we get your vote? What is it going to take?” Given Israel’s failure to convince a significant number of Democratic senators to oppose the deal, the suspicion arises that the administration read the answers and used the ill-begotten information as a means of blocking Israel from securing Democratic opposition to Obama’s nuclear deal.

It ought to go without saying that the administration’s massive efforts to block information about the most radical US foreign policy initiative since World War II from US lawmakers speaks volumes about how Obama and his colleagues assessed the public’s position on Iran generally and Obama’s nuclear talks with the mullocracy specifically.

The nuclear deal with Iran endangers the US directly.

It empowers the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism financially, diplomatically and militarily.

Iran declared war against the US 37 years ago and has been calling for the destruction of America and supporting terrorist attacks against the US and its allies ever since.

As to those allies, the nuclear deal with Iran specifically, and the Obama administration’s decision to embrace Iran as a potential ally more generally, place Israel in jeopardy. So, too, it endangers all of the US’s traditional Arab allies.

Yet rather than reconsider its strategic goal of courting Iran at the expense of its own national security and that of its closest allies, the Obama administration determined that its most urgent goal was to scuttle Israeli attempts to warn lawmakers and the US public about the dangers of the deal. …

Iran still refuses to approve or implement the deal. The American hostages it holds continue to languish in its prisons. Its nuclear sites remain closed to international inspectors. Its ballistic missile program is moving forward …  Iran is so emboldened … that last week it shot a missile across the Straits of Hormuz in close proximity to a US naval ship.

The ayatollahs are convinced that Obama will suffer any and all indignities to keep up the fiction that he has a nuclear deal with them. …

And yet [it is] now, as Iran daily humiliates Obama with its unbridled aggression, that senior administration officials chose to brag to Wall Street Journal reporters about how they spied on Israel in breach of Obama’s pledge not to spy on leaders of US allied nations. It is now, when Obama’s opening to Iran is a self-evident failure, that they chose to share how they broke US law by spying on US citizens and abused the president’s constitutional authority by spying on US lawmakers. …

[This administration is] so contemptuous of US lawmakers and citizens that its senior officials have no compunction about admitting that they are breaking the law.

They brazenly admit that they are undertaking unlawful spying operations against private citizens and lawmakers and in so doing conducting a massive abuse of presidential powers while trampling the spirit and arguably the letter of the US Constitution.

And they expect that no one will call them to task for it.

They are most probably right.

The rest of the world has no comeback against Obama and his gang for the furies he has let loose in it.

But will he ever be made to answer for the great harm he has deliberately done to America?