The President’s first son, Donald Trump Jr., has risen to prominence alongside his father not for his business acumen or his political commentary but rather for his fondness for attempting to engage in his father’s perverse brand of political muckraking – and the frequency with which his attempts to smear Democrats end up backfiring on him.
His latest effort is an attempt to use a POLITICO hit piece to smear former President Barack Obama and accusing him of “colluding” with Lebanese militant group Hezbollah – a laughably weak attempt to drag the spotlight off of President Trump and Donald Trump Jr. himself, both of whom are under investigation for colluding with agents of the Russian Federation in order to tilt the 2016 election in Trump’s favor.
The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook. The real collusion story no one will cover. https://t.co/eRwjVmtiTs
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) December 18, 2017
A U.S. criminal task force was allegedly prevented from bringing charges against certain senior members of Hezbollah involved in arms smuggling and money laundering because the Obama administration didn’t want to jeopardize the President’s historic nuclear arms treaty with Hezbollah’s Iranian backers.
Former officials denied that they derailed any actions against Hezbollah or its Iranian allies for political reasons. There’s no evidence beyond the allegations of a few disgruntled law enforcement officers that this was done for political reasons; a former Obama national security official pointed out that there’s a wide variety of reasons the administration wanted to hold back on prosecution, including a lack of evidence or concerns about interfering with intelligence operations could have been in play.
“What if the CIA or [Israeli intelligence agency] the Mossad had an intelligence operation ongoing inside Hezbollah and they were trying to pursue someone . . . against whom we had impeccable [intelligence] collection and the DEA is not going to know that? I get the feeling people who don’t know what’s going on in the broader universe are grasping at straws.”
If one does a little bit of digging, you will find that the sources behind the story are from hardline neoconservatives who are pushing very hard for the United States to engage in a fruitless and incredibly destructive war with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
7. The Politico hit piece on Obama bases its case on two sources: Katherine Bauer, from a think tank started by Israeli lobby AIPAC alums, which wants a war with Iran, and David Asher, from an anti-Iran, pro-Israel, neocon think tank, "Foundation for Defense of Democracies" (FDD) pic.twitter.com/GbUo9b7ZO4
— Adam Khan (@Khanoisseur) December 18, 2017
Even if the Obama administration had interfered in the investigation against Hezbollah, the United States government has a long history of excusing not only criminal activity like money laundering or cocaine trafficking but also war crimes and atrocities by the right-wing militias and regimes we’ve funded and propped up around the world – including the war crimes that the Trump administration itself is perpetrating in the Middle East.
Can one put a price on the value of a nuclear peace treaty?
Can one truly argue that the minor benefits of temporarily disrupting the drug trade and money laundering network that our ruling oligarchs constructed and still require to maintain the carceral state and sanitize their own ill-gotten gains are more valuable than heading off a potential nuclear weapons crisis that could kill millions of innocent people?
Perhaps one can make that argument, but Donald Trump Jr. is certainly not a person qualified to do so.
In his own tweet, he complains that “the media” isn’t covering the story while sharing a link of the story being published by one of the most prominent political news outlets in the country.
Which tells you all you need to know about the level of analysis that Trump Jr. engages in.
Twitter users were quick to set the record straight.
They covered it. That’s why the article exists.
— Orli Matlow (@HireMeImFunny) December 18, 2017
if no one is covering it…… then how are you tweeting out a link to a news website that is covering it?
— Neville (@1FightingIrish) December 18, 2017
my dude you are literally linking to the coverage
— Brittany Van Horne (@_brittanyv) December 18, 2017
