A top House Democrat on Tuesday defended President Obama’s deputy national security adviser from Republican accusations that he worked to spin a false story about the Iran nuclear agreement in order to get it through Congress, and charged the GOP with hypocrisy for inviting a former Bush administration official who helped build the case for the invasion of Iraq.
The White House refused to provide Ben Rhodes for questioning before a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing to explain comments he made in a New York Times magazine piece, which indicated that he used journalists to create an “echo chamber” to help sell the Iran deal to Congress and the American public.
Rep. Elijah Cummings, R-Md., the ranking member of the panel, defended Rhodes record on promoting the Iran deal in the press and among D.C. think tanks, and impugned the hearing as an exercise in hypocrisy. As evidence, he pointed to the Republicans’ witness for the hearing, John Hannah, a senior counselor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who served as a former national security adviser to then-Vice President Dick Cheney from 2005 to 2009.
The choice of Hannah, Cummings argued, is particularly “ironic” because he was partly responsible for spinning support for the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Cummings called that “one of the biggest misrepresentations in our nation’s history.”
“I don’t know Mr. Hannah, and I don’t believe I’ve ever met him before today,” Cummings said. “But based on the public record alone … if our goal is to hear from an expert who actually promoted false, false White House narratives, then I think you picked the right person.”
“Listening to John Hannah criticize anyone else for pushing a false White House narrative if beyond ironic,” he continued. “He and Dick Cheney and their colleagues in the White House wrote the how-to manual on this.”
Cummings said Hannah was at least partly responsible for writing a speech that Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered to the United Nations in which he argued that Iraq had pursued weapons of mass destruction.
That is a speech “that Secretary Powell has called a permanent blot on his record,” Cummings said.
Hannah, he said, was also the principal point of contact in Cheney’s office for the Iraqi National Congress, an organization that supplied the Bush administration with “reams” of false information about Iraq’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
He also worked directly for Scooter Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, who was indicted for making false statements to federal investigators concerning the possible illegal leaking by government officials of the classified identity of Valerie Plame Wilson, the wife of former Ambassador Joe Wilson.
Wilson is known for his 2002 trip to Niger in which he said he failed to find any evidence that Hussein tried to purchase yellowcake uranium.
Cummings went on to call the Iraq War a “profound tragedy” that killed thousands of U.S. service members and spent hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars “even by the most conservative estimates.”
