Former U.S. President Barack Obama delivers a statement on the relations between US and Iran (Aude Guerrucci/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images)
The mainstream media has had a lot of practice ignoring Obama-era scandals. It should come as no surprise that major news outlets continue to ignore Obama scandals surfacing after his presidency.
Politico published a bombshell report over the weekend, offering meticulous detail on how the Obama administration killed intelligence and law enforcement agency efforts to shut down Hezbollah's narco-terror network. The motive? Obama protecting his precious Iran nuclear deal, which would be threatened if Iran's pet terror organization suffered defeats at Obama's hand.
According to Newsbusters, all three major network news outlets (ABC, CBS, and NBC), and the Spanish-language networks (Univision and Telemundo) blacked out the incredible scandal. CNN and MSNBC appear to have ignored it as well.
Fox News, of course, is covering the story: “A very serious charge tonight against the Obama administration. A bombshell report alleges the government deliberately sabotaged its own efforts to fight terrorist drug and money laundering operations,” declared Fox News anchor Bret Baier on Special Report before handing the report off to Doug McKelway.
“At what cost was the nuclear deal with Iran reached?” McKelway asked. “In an effort to reach the agreement, [the Obama administration] drastically curtailed efforts to interdict cocaine shipments into the U.S. by Hezbollah, a terrorist organization closely allied with Iran.”
“In 2016, a DEA official told a congressional panel that Operation Cassandra, a massive law-enforcement effort to stop the Hezbollah drug trade, was inexplicably curtailed,” McKelway added.
Via Newsbusters:
In a clip played by McKelway, former DEA Chief of Operations Michael Braun testified before Congress that “for some unknown reason, we seem to have missed out on one opportunity after another. We seem to have forgotten about the importance of disrupting the supply chain.”Politico spoke with a former CIA officer who confirmed that the Obama administration’s efforts to stifle their investigation were tied to directly to the nuclear deal with Iran:DEA operations in the Middle East were shut down repeatedly due to political sensitivities, especially in Lebanon, according to one former CIA officer working in the region. He said pressure from the White House also prompted the CIA to declare “a moratorium” on covert operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon, too, for a time, after the administration received complaints from Iranian negotiators.“[Obama] really, really, really wanted the deal,” the CIA officer added.
Of course, as mentioned, underplaying or ignoring Obama's scandals is nothing new for such outlets. For example: missing stimulus money, the Sestak Affair,DealerGate, politicization of the National Endowment of the Arts, DOJ settlement slush funds, Operation Fast and Furious, the firing of Americorps IG Gerald Walpin, the IRS targeting scandal, ObamaCare lies, DOJ Spying on journalists, Benghazi, the Pigford scandal, the NSA spying scandal, the EPA Gold King Mine spill, the GSA Las Vegas scandal, the VA death-list scandal, Solyndra,Shutdown theater, the State Department whistleblower scandal, the Taliban Five/Bergdahl trade, the Iran nuclear deal and ransom payment, the skewing of ISIS intel, EmailGate, mass spying on Americans, and unmasking Trump associates.
Many Americans simply don't remember or never learned about many of those egregious scandals because mainstream media neglected to report on most of them adequately. Of course, the media sure knows how to give wall-to-wall,flood-the-zone coverage to a scandalous story when sufficiently motivated.
We all see what the media is capable of in the way they have latched on to the "RussiaGate" narrative as if it's the scandal of the century. Had they focused on those early scandals the way they've obsessed over "RussiaGate," Obama would have been impeached before his second term.
Let's see how the media behaves this time, in the likely event the House Oversight Committee decides to look into the shocking Hezbollah report.
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