WSJ: US Monitored Contacts Between Israel and GOP Members of Congress as They Tried to Subvert Iran Deal
Right wing sites all over the net are screaming that this report from the Wall Street Journal proves President Obama “hates Israel.” For example:
BREAKING: Jew-hating administration singled out Jewish state for surveillance while negotiating with country pledging genocide against Jews
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) December 30, 2015
But if you actually read about what was going on, the Obama administration had very good reason to continue surveillance of Netanyahu and his right wing Israeli government, because they were spying on the US and blatantly trying to subvert our government’s negotiations with Iran, even leaking information obtained by spying to members of Congress: U.S. Spy Net on Israel Snares Congress.
The U.S., pursuing a nuclear arms agreement with Iran at the time, captured communications between Mr. Netanyahu and his aides that inflamed mistrust between the two countries and planted a political minefield at home when Mr. Netanyahu later took his campaign against the deal to Capitol Hill.
The National Security Agency’s targeting of Israeli leaders and officials also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups. That raised fears—an “Oh-s— moment,” one senior U.S. official said—that the executive branch would be accused of spying on Congress.
White House officials believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign. They also recognized that asking for it was politically risky. So, wary of a paper trail stemming from a request, the White House let the NSA decide what to share and what to withhold, officials said. “We didn’t say, ‘Do it,’ ” a senior U.S. official said. “We didn’t say, ‘Don’t do it.’ ”
Stepped-up NSA eavesdropping revealed to the White House how Mr. Netanyahu and his advisers had leaked details of the U.S.-Iran negotiations—learned through Israeli spying operations—to undermine the talks; coordinated talking points with Jewish-American groups against the deal; and asked undecided lawmakers what it would take to win their votes, according to current and former officials familiar with the intercepts.
It’s a measure of how utterly deranged the right wing media have gotten that they’re angrier at President Obama for keeping watch on a foreign government’s attempt to subvert US policy than they are at the outrageous behavior of Benjamin Netanyahu.
And by the way, that deal with Iran that Netanyahu tried to sabotage is working so far: Kerry: Iran Ships Uranium to Russia in ‘Significant’ Step for Nuclear Deal.
WASHINGTON — A ship carrying more than 25,000 pounds of low-enriched uranium materials left Iran for Russia on Monday in a step toward honoring Iran’s July 14 nuclear deal with major powers, the United States said.
[…]
A key provision of the agreement — negotiated by Iran with the United States, Britain, China, France, Russia and Germany — is Tehran’s commitment to reduce its stockpile of low-enriched uranium to below 660 pounds (300 kg).
If much further refined, low-enriched uranium can yield fissile material for nuclear weapons.
“The shipment included the removal of all of Iran’s nuclear material enriched to 20 percent that was not already in the form of fabricated fuel plates for the Tehran Research Reactor,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said in a written statement.