- Mon Dec 18, 2017 12:47 pm
#97679
Obama "I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction."
The Obama administration protected members of notorious terror group Hezbollah from prosecution to save the Iran nuclear deal, a new report reveals.
A team at the Drug Enforcement Administration had been working for almost a decade to bring down the Lebanon-based militant organization’s sophisticated $1 billion-a-year drug ring — which it found was smuggling cocaine into the US and laundering the profits by buying used cars stateside and shipping them to Africa for resale, Politico reports.
But the departments of Justice and Treasury at the top levels delayed and rejected prosecution and sanctions requests from the team that had exposed the Iran-backed criminal network because the Obama White House feared “rocking the boat” with Tehran ahead of the deal, the site reports.
“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” David Asher, who helped found the program for the Defense Department. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort, destroyed years of evidence that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”
The taskforce, named Project Cassandra, worked for eight years out of a top-secret facility in Virginia with help from 30 American and foreign security agencies, unraveling the global crime syndicate that was funding Hezbollah’s Jihadi operations, the site reports. The drug operation which brought in an estimated $1 billion-a-year in profits which were primarily used to fund Hezbollah terrorists operations.
Among those the team sought to bring to justice were Abdallah Safieddine, the group’s envoy to Tehran and a shadowy operative nicknamed “Ghost,” who it considered one of the biggest cocaine smugglers in the world.
“Hezbollah operates like the Gambino crime family on steroids, and [Safieddine] is its John Gotti,” ex-DEA agent Jack Kelly, who created the taskforce, told Politico. “Whatever Iran needs, Safieddine is in charge of getting it for them.”
But the administration repeatedly stymied efforts to prosecute Safieddine — even though the team had eyewitnesses willing to testify that he’d overseen big weapons and drug deals — and ultimately shut Project Cassandra down and classified the drug investigation to prevent it's release, once the nuclear deal was settled.
“They were a paramilitary organization with strategic importance in the Middle East, and we watched them become an international criminal conglomerate generating billions of dollars for the world’s most dangerous activities, including chemical and nuclear weapons programs and armies that believe America is their sworn enemy,” Kelly told the site. All evidence collected during the years long investigation was seized by the DOJ and the investigative teams disbanded for what they called national security reasons. Jerry Owens, a former DEA member of the task force said many of the players are still operating in Virginia and still have contacts within the DOJ and FBI, that he suspects "have their backs".
- By johnforbes
- By brandon