Project Cassandra... Another Foreign policy failure of the Obama administration

[eagle1462010]

Project Cassandra was a DEA operation against Hezbollah operatives in the United States used to fund their proxy military in places like Lebanon. To shut down Money Laundering via the United States to Terrorist in the Middle East and prosecute their cells here in the United States.

Obama wanted the Iran deal so badly..........that they blocked it's progress and killed it after 8 years of investigation because they wanted THE IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL. This is why it is another Obama Foreign policy FAILURE.

Here is the Politico story that broke this open.
The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook

They followed cocaine shipments, tracked a river of dirty cash, and traced what they believed to be the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests.

One Obama-era Treasury official, Katherine Bauer, in little-noticed written testimony presented last February to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, acknowledged that “under the Obama administration … these [Hezbollah-related] investigations were tamped down for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.”

 

[ColonelAngus]

Obama will go down as the worst President ever.

What a fucking joke piece of trash.

Spying on political opponents? Wow.

 

[eagle1462010]

Sessions orders a review of Project Cassandra

On Friday, the Justice Department repeated Sessions’ support for the probe of “prior DEA investigations” and for future investigations of Hezbollah activities.

Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid said that “Obama must return his Nobel Peace Prize” if the Politico story is correct.


and now a Congressional report on it.
Congressional Record


What most Americans know about Hezbollah is that it is an Iran-backed
proxy militia based in Lebanon, which was responsible for a string of
terrorist attacks against Americans in the 1980s, including the attack
in 1983 of the Beirut barracks, which killed 241 American
servicemembers.

But what most Americans are not aware of, Mr. Speaker, is that over
the last 30 years, Hezbollah has evolved beyond its origins as Iran's
attack dog in the Middle East and they now run one of the world's most
expansive and dangerous multinational criminal networks in the world.

Hezbollah, Mr. Speaker, is a scourge not only in the Middle East, but
throughout the entire world. The reason we know this--which has just,
in recent days, started to become public--is because, in 2008, the DEA
launched a campaign known as Project Cassandra, which amassed evidence
over 8 years of investigation regarding Hezbollah's criminal
activities. They used wiretaps, undercover operations, informants, and
so forth to map Hezbollah's illicit networks with the help of some 30
different U.S. and foreign security agencies. These DEA agents traced
the activities all the way to the inner circles of Hezbollah and its
state sponsors in Iran.
But--and here is where all of this starts coming into play--when the
time came to extradite and prosecute these terrorists, the Obama
administration's Department of Justice and Department of State refused
to move forward.
That is unthinkable to me. It is unthinkable to many people in our
country.
The Justice Department refused to file criminal charges against
suspects that were already in custody in Europe. The State Department
refused to put meaningful pressure on allied countries to extradite
Hezbollah leaders to the United States.
Why? Why did they refuse to get involved?
According to an Obama administration Treasury official, in her
written testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee,
investigations to Hezbollah were tapped down for fear of rocking the
boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.

 

[ColonelAngus]

It’s incredible that Dimms whined about the Patriot Act, but then they got power, they used it against their political opponents, they didn’t revoke it.

Dimms only have morals when the deck is stacked against them. When they have the power, they don’t give a fuck about morals.

They are money and power hungry troglodytes.

 

[Sunni Man]

 

[eagle1462010]

Congressional Record

It has become a player in international cocaine trafficking--using
the proceeds of that drug trafficking to purchase explosives, EFPs,
which is the deadliest type of IED used against American soldiers in
Iraq.
EFPs killed hundreds of American soldiers, and they were supplied by
the Iranian Government and its Hezbollah allies. EFPs were literally
ripping M1 Abrams tanks in half. It is a weapon that makes all the
armor protection they have irrelevant. Mere threats of EFPs shut down
all ground supply routes near American bases on the Iranian border.
The result: cut off the head or the financing of Hezbollah through
these international cocaine distribution routes.
Project Cassandra was born in 2008. It found clear evidence that
Hezbollah had grown from a Middle East-focused military and political
organization into an international crime syndicate, likely collecting
somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion a year from drug and
weapons trafficking, money laundering, and other criminal activities.
For 8 years, DEA agents conducted high-stakes investigations--
dangerous investigations--using technology as well as undercover
operations and informants. That type of capital is expensive and
dangerous.

Mr. Speaker, the Drug Enforcement Agency agent on the case, who has
over 20 years of government experience tracking the financing of terror
networks, said this of the leader of Hezbollah:

I had no clue who he was, but this guy was sending money
into Iraq to kill American soldiers.

The point is he had 20 years on the job. This wasn't some piker who
just showed up on the job at Treasury and said: ``Hey, track this money
and see what you can find.'' This is a guy who did this for a living
for 20 years, and he ran into Hezbollah. He ran into Hezbollah, based
on his investigation.

I believe it is incumbent upon Congress at this time to fulfill the
obligation that we have to exercise oversight over the executive branch
and follow through with a thorough investigation of the Obama
administration's refusal--absolute refusal--to follow through on the
work that was done by the DEA.

{time} 2000

We had these terrorists in our grasp, Mr. Speaker, and we let them
go. How could this happen? The American people deserve to know why, and
we need to get to the bottom of this.
That is why tonight we are calling for an investigation into all
aspects of this Hezbollah scandal, regardless of where it leads us: to
the very top of the Obama administration, the Secretary of State, the
previous Department of Justice, wherever it may lead. We need to get to
the bottom of this, and we are calling for an investigation.

 

[Sunni Man]

Obama with be called by future historians the 'black Jimmy Carter".

Ineffective and clueless, his administration and leadership style will rank at the very bottom of every category.

Obama's failures will be required study by political science professors at major universities.

And citizens who survived the 8 years he occupied the White House, will be referred to as the "greatest generation" for having endured the Obama years. ..

 

[eagle1462010]

https://nypost.com/2017/12/18/obama-protected-hezbollah-drug-ring-to-save-iran-nukes-deal/

When the Iran agreement took effect in January 2016, the investigation — dubbed Project Cassandra — was effectively dismantled.

“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” said David Asher, an expert in illicit finance who helped found the project. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”

The task force worked for eight years out of a top-secret facility in Virginia, with the help of 30 American and foreign security agencies, to unravel the global crime syndicate that was funding Hezbollah’s jihadist operations.

In 2007, Venezuela’s state-run Conviasa airline was ferrying drugs and cash from Caracas to Tehran via Syria each week, according to Politico.

Others the team sought to bring to justice were Abdallah Safieddine, Hezzbollah’s envoy to Tehran, and a shadowy operative nicknamed “Ghost,” whom 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 task force, told Politico. “Whatever Iran needs, Safieddine is in charge of getting it for them.”

Safieddine was ultimately linked to a massive drug-smuggling and money-laundering network allegedly led by Lebanese businessman Ayman Joumaa.

Agents discovered Joumaa had smuggled tons of cocaine into the States — then laundered $200 million a month by buying used cars from American dealers.

The cars were sent to Benin in West Africa, where satellite photos taken in 2015 showed rows upon rows of used cars in a lot.

But the Obama administration repeatedly thwarted efforts to prosecute Safieddine, Politico reported.

 

[eagle1462010]

https://docs.house.gov/meetings/HM/...HHRG-115-HM05-Wstate-OttolenghiE-20180417.pdf

This toxic crime-terror nexus is fueling both the rising threat of global jihadism and the collapse of law and order across Latin America that is helping drive drugs and people northward into the United States. It is sustaining Hezbollah’s growing financial needs. It is helping Iran and Hezbollah consolidate a local constituency in multiple countries across Latin America. It is thus facilitating their efforts to build safe havens for terrorists and a continent-wide terror infrastructure that they could use to strike U.S. targets.

A survey of cases prosecuted against Hezbollah operatives in the past two decades shows that the terror group remains a threat to the security of the U.S. homeland and the integrity of its financial system. Iran and Hezbollah sought to carry out high casualty attacks against U.S. targets multiple times. Additionally, they built networks they used to procure weapons, sell drugs, and conduct illicit financial activities inside the United States. These cases highlight a number of important elements we must consider when thinking about U.S. responses to Hezbollah’s threat in the Western Hemisphere:

Nearly two decades of experience confronting Hezbollah through sanctions and prosecutions offer important lessons on best practices as well as mistakes that must now be rectified. Iran and Hezbollah made at least three documented attempts to support, plot or conduct terror attacks on U.S. soil in recent years – these are discussed in the next section. Their Latin America networks, however, have mainly been dedicated to terror finance.

 

[eagle1462010]

Hezbollah’s London Bomb-Making Plot, the Iran Nuclear Deal, and Bruce Ohr

The 2015 case was kept “hidden from the public” until now.

2015 London Bomb-Making Plot
The political shakiness of the Iran nuclear deal, combined with ongoing scrutiny of its various flaws makes the news of the fall 2015 discovery of a huge cache of ammonium nitrate—a common ingredient in homemade bombs—particularly noteworthy.

“Terrorists linked to Iran were caught stockpiling tons of explosive materials on the outskirts of London in a secret British bomb factory,” The Daily Telegraph reported. “Radicals linked to Hizbollah (also Hezbollah), the Lebanese militant group, stashed thousands of disposable ice packs containing ammonium nitrate—a common ingredient in homemade bombs.

“The plot was uncovered by MI5 and the Met Police just months after the UK signed up to the Iran nuclear deal.”

According to the Telegraph, the plot, which was uncovered in “the autumn of 2015,” involved more than three tons of ammonium nitrate. By way of comparison, the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 that killed 168 people involved two tons of ANFO—a combination of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. The Telegraph reported that, “A well-placed source described the plot as ‘proper organized terrorism,’ while another said enough explosive materials were stored to do ‘a lot of damage.'”

 

[eagle1462010]

That should be more than enough proof on this.

Obama shut down the DEA to stop money laundering from terrorists in the United States to get the Nuclear Deal, and he signed the deal in the exact same time period as Iran was going to do a massive terror attack in London.

Amazing LEGACY ISN'T IT..........