More Evidence the Obama White House Deliberately Deceived on the Iran Deal

In March 2015, Joe Cirincione, president of a foundation called the Ploughshares Fund, was interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered about the impending nuclear deal with Iran. “President Obama’s political opponents try to block everything he does,” he said. “But I think the center of the American security establishment is solidly behind the deal as it’s been outlined.” The interview was headlined on NPR’s website, “Nuclear Experts Remain Optimistic About Iranian Negotiations.” Now that the Iranian deal has been finalized, so many discomfiting facts about the campaign to push it through a reluctant Congress have emerged that it’s difficult to keep track of them all. The latest revelations, however, are especially startling. On May 20, the Associated Press reported that Cirincione’s Ploughshares Fund apparently bought and paid for this favorable NPR coverage, giving the news outlet $100,000 last year and $700,000 in grants over a decade. Ploughshares also gave money to the Center for Public Integrity, which supports the influential nonprofit news outlet ProPublica, along with left-leaning publications such as Mother Jones and the Nation to beef-up their Iran coverage.

Any consideration of Obama’s priorities in the Middle East has to address the most contested part of his legacy, the still unfolding crisis in Syria. Many critics, including former members of his administration, have charged that Obama’s reluctance to intervene to a greater extent in Syria was motivated in part by the desire to achieve the nuclear agreement with Bashar al-Assad’s patron, Iran. In the new documentary, The Final Year, which follows Obama’s foreign policy team throughout 2016, adviser Ben Rhodes essentially legitimizes this claim by defending Obama’s hands-off policy in part by saying that if the U.S. had intervened more forcefully in Syria, it would have dominated Obama’s second term and the JCPOA [Iran Deal] would have been impossible to achieve. Rhodes may be right, but it’s less and less clear as time goes on that this was the right trade-off.