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Politico: Obama Admin Derailed DEA’s Hezbollah Probe for the Sake of the Iran Deal

By Jenna Lifhits

The Obama administration hobbled a covert initiative that tracked Hezbollah’s web of criminal activities, allowing millions of dollars to fall into the hands of the Iran-backed militia, according to a Politico report. Efforts to stymie the initiative, former officials told Politico, were fueled in large part by a desire to secure the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

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Founded in 2008, Project Cassandra tracked Hezbollah’s drug trafficking, money laundering, weapons procurement, and other criminal activities—activities that some investigators believed allowed the group to rake in $1 billion a year. The group’s illicit ventures, a top official involved with Project Cassandra later told Congress, represented “the largest material support scheme for terrorism operations in the world.”

But not long after the initiative’s inception, requests from Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents to open investigations and make arrests were increasingly hampered or rejected. Politico reports:

The Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force. And the State Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries where they could be arrested. “This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” said David Asher, who helped establish and oversee Project Cassandra as a Defense Department illicit finance analyst. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.” … The administration also rejected repeated efforts by Project Cassandra members to charge Hezbollah’s military wing as an ongoing criminal enterprise under a federal Mafia-style racketeering statute, task force members say. And they allege that administration officials declined to designate Hezbollah a “significant transnational criminal organization” and blocked other strategic initiatives that would have given the task force additional legal tools, money and manpower to fight it.

The administration’s “systematic decision” was driven by the desire for a nuclear deal with Iran, former officials told Politico, as well as a stated desire to “build up” Hezbollah’s “moderate elements.”

In practice, the administration’s willingness to envision a new role for Hezbollah in the Middle East, combined with its desire for a negotiated settlement to Iran’s nuclear program, translated into a reluctance to move aggressively against the top Hezbollah operatives, according to Project Cassandra members and others. … Asher, for one, said Obama administration officials expressed concerns to him about alienating Tehran before, during and after the Iran nuclear deal negotiations. This was, he said, part of an effort to “defang, defund and undermine the investigations that were involving Iran and Hezbollah,” he said. “The closer we got to the [Iran deal], the more these activities went away,” Asher said. “So much of the capability, whether it was special operations, whether it was law enforcement, whether it was [Treasury] designations — even the capacity, the personnel assigned to this mission — it was assiduously drained, almost to the last drop, by the end of the Obama administration.”

Shortly after Obama sealed the Iran deal, Project Cassandra “was all but dead,” with top officials “transferred to other assignments.”

But a former Obama official interviewed by Politico rejected the suggestion that the administration had stymied Project Cassandra for political purposes, citing the potential for disrupting other intelligence operations. “What if the CIA or 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?” the official said.

White House pressure reached beyond the DEA, according to Politico’s wide-ranging report. The Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) operations against Hezbollah had also been hindered, an ex-CIA officer told Politico.

“During the negotiations, early on, they [the Iranians] said listen, we need you to lay off Hezbollah, to tamp down the pressure on them, and the Obama administration acquiesced to that request,” the officer said, adding that the Obama negotiating team “really, really, really wanted the deal.”

Read the full-length Politico piece here.

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