We hope Sens. Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand are giving that devastating new profile of President Obama’s foreign-policy guru a careful read.
Because they’ll learn how they were all played for fools on the Iran nuclear deal by that aide, Ben Rhodes — and the president.
That applies especially to Schumer, who will be the Senate Democratic leader come January.
Booker and Gillibrand hewed to the party line in backing the deal. Schumer gave it a thumb’s-down — but then refused to lobby his colleagues to take his side.
Sen. Bob Menendez, on the other hand, is looking better than ever. He not only forcefully denounced the deal, he laid out a clear and cogent alternative.
Now Rhodes is openly boasting in a New York Times Magazine profile how Team Obama (with the help of gullible journalists) resorted to outright lies and deceit to sell the deal to Congress.
Like the fiction that the deal was initiated by the “breakthrough” when a “moderate” beat the “hard-liners” to become Iran’s president in 2013 and reached out to Obama.
Nonsense: Rhodes admits planning for a deal began right after Obama took office, with the details hammered out by the State Department in 2012 — which is when talks with Iran actually began.
Former CIA Director Leon Panetta even puts the lie to the notion that Team Obama believed the new president meant anything: “There was no question that the Quds Force and the supreme leader ran that country with a strong arm.”
Panetta, who also served as secretary of defense, repeatedly assured the Israelis (and Congress) that Obama would never let Iran develop nuclear weapons. Today, he says, “Would I make that same assessment now? Probably not.”
The Times piece recounts how a 30-year-old aspiring novelist with no experience was put in charge of crafting foreign policy by a president who shared his contempt for the experts and conviction that anyone who disagrees is a warmonger.
Cabinet secretaries like Panetta — and Hillary Clinton — were irrelevant.
Well, senators, now you know the infuriating — and, for you, humiliating — truth. What do you plan to do about it?