“His worldview is very clear,” said Ari Shavit, an Israeli journalist who has long covered Mr. Netanyahu. “Iran is Nazi Germany. Israel is England. He is Churchill and America is America. His main goal has been to persuade Roosevelt to get into a conflict that will crush Iran. It didn’t work with Obama. But with President Trump he sees a golden opportunity.”
All of that is absurd. But the most absurd would be comparing Donald Trump to FDR which is why they just say “America is America.”
Trump’s cretinous Ambassador to Germany makes a splash
by digby
He might as well have chosen Ann Coulter:
Within hours of assuming his new post Tuesday, [America’s new ambassador to Germany] Richard Grenell triggered harsh criticism in this Trump-weary country after appearing to threaten one of the U.S. president’s frequent targets: German businesses.
In a tweet after President Trump’s announcement to leave the Iran nuclear deal, Grenell wrote that “German companies doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately.” Germany, alongside France and Britain, wants to stick to the deal Trump is seeking to scrap. And while Grenell’s post may not deviate from the official White House stance on future European business dealings with Iran, the timing and tone struck some German politicians, journalists and business executives as offensive and inappropriate.
The remarks, which were widely perceived as a threat here, came only an hour after the U.S. Embassy in Berlin took to Twitter to announce that Grenell had officially arrived in the German capital.
He’s known to be an asshole on twitter just like his boss Donald Trump. Mitt Romney fired him for it. Now he’s representing the US with one of our closest allies. Well, they used to be anyway. Trump is determined to alienate America from everyone but the worst people on earth.
The results of Tuesday’s primary elections simultaneously bolstered the Republican Party mainstream and demonstrated how much ground it has yielded to Donald Trump, particularly on the volatile issue of immigration.
In several key races, GOP primary voters rejected candidates who presented themselves as the most ardent acolytes of Trump, in terms of style, political agenda, or both. But the relatively more mainstream alternatives triumphed in those contests only after embracing much, or all, of Trump’s hostility toward immigration. That dynamic underscores Trump’s success at eroding resistance in the GOP toward his racially infused nationalism. And that could prove a defining gamble for the party in a nation inexorably growing more diverse.
In the near term, Republican strategists were mostly breathing a sigh of relief after voters picked party favorites over populist and conservative insurgents in almost all races where they clashed. (The biggest exception was a North Carolina House race.)
In Ohio, state attorney general and former U.S. Senator Mike DeWine easily won the gubernatorial nomination over Lieutenant Governor Mary Taylor, who bonded herself to Trump and besieged DeWine as insufficiently conservative. In the Columbus, Ohio, district being vacated by Representative Pat Tiberi—the site of the next marquee U.S. House special election—state Senator Troy Balderson narrowly topped Melanie Leneghan, who ran hard to his right. In the West Virginia Senate primary, the formerly incarcerated coal-company executive Don Blankenship declared himself “Trumpier than Trump,” but finished a distant third; state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey captured the nomination to face Democrat Joe Manchin in November.
All of these losers threw thunderbolts on immigration. Taylor aired a blistering ad attacking DeWine as soft on the issue, with images of shadowy figures scrambling across a road. Blankenship, who served a year in prison for his role in a mine explosion that killed 29 workers, went the furthest, with an 11th-hour ad that accused Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of creating “millions of jobs for China people” and accepting “tens of millions of dollars” from “his China family.” That language, stripped of any remaining veil of nativism, referred to the Taiwanese heritage of McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, Trump’s transportation secretary.
The defeats of these candidates showed that even in the Trump-era GOP condemning immigrants most vociferously is no guarantee of primary success. But even more telling was how aggressively the more mainstream, winning candidates sought to coopt these arguments. If there was a major GOP candidate in these primaries who did not loudly declare their support for building Trump’s border wall, I didn’t see it. Likewise, every major GOP candidate pledged to crack down on so-called “sanctuary cities,” which limit their cooperation with federal immigration-enforcement officials, and several pledged to constrict legal immigration.
Mike Braun, the business executive who beat two Republican House members for the Senate nomination in Indiana, succinctly expressed this new conservative catechism in one ad: “We must build the wall, ban sanctuary cities, and put an end to chain migration.” Even in West Virginia, Morrisey and Representative Evan Jenkins, who finished second, apparently raised no public objections to Blankenship’s broadsides against “China people.”
Perhaps most dramatic was DeWine’s response to Taylor’s assault on his immigration record. As a U.S. senator from Ohio, DeWine in 2006 had supported the bipartisan immigration-reform bill that passed the Senate, which provided a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants. But rather than defend his past position against Taylor, DeWine aired his own ad declaring he “is fighting for President Trump’s travel ban that will keep us safe and punishing illegal sanctuary cities.”
These maneuvers confirmed a pattern established in earlier Trump-era Republican contests. In last year’s Republican gubernatorial primary in Virginia, Ed Gillespie narrowly beat anti-immigration firebrand Corey Stewart. But during the general election, Gillespie—who years earlier, as the Republican National Committee chairman, had championed a more inclusive party—swerved toward nativist themes, with ads darkly warning of threats from the Central American gang MS-13.
Likewise, Representative Martha McSally, the Republican-establishment favorite in August’s upcoming Arizona Senate primary, has moved to preempt two immigration hard-liners to her right—Kelli Ward and former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio—by co-sponsoring legislation from House conservatives. Their bill would not only fund the wall and stiffen enforcement against undocumented immigration, but it would also cut legal immigration in half.
In all these ways, relatively more mainstream Republican candidates are holding off the anti-immigration vanguard by accepting much of their agenda. Only a handful of prominent Republicans, such as Arizona Senators Jeff Flake and John McCain, still publicly dissent. “There is not an obvious set of leaders to put a break on this,” said Simon Rosenberg, the founder of the Democratic advocacy group NDN, who has long studied the impact of demographic change on both parties.
Especially striking is that Republicans are stampeding toward this harder line not just in Rustbelt states like Ohio, West Virginia, and Indiana—which have few immigrants and little diversity. They’re also doing so in the Southwest states, where there are growing Latino and Asian American populations. Texas Governor Greg Abbot has signed legislation to punish sanctuary cities. At last weekend’s California Republican state convention, delegates flocked to a session encouraging local governments to join the Trump administration’s lawsuit against the state’s sanctuary law. And the Arizona Senate primary has been a race to the right on immigration.
All of these choices reflect the magnetic pull Trump is exerting inside the GOP coalition. But in the broader electorate, roughly three-fifths of Americans have opposed building the border wall and an even higher share has supported some legal status for the undocumented. While sanctuary policies can be more difficult ground for Democrats to defend, polls consistently show significantly more Americans believe immigration strengthens, rather than weakens, the country; the margin was greater than 2 to 1, for instance, in an NBC/Wall Street Journal survey released last September.
Just because they didn’t vote for a criminal who was responsible for the deaths of 29 people nobody should assume that the Republicans have “returned to normalcy.” It’s just that the mainstream professionals are now putting a sheen of respectability on Trump’s fascism.
Keep in mind that he is engaging in mass deportation. It’s not just ICE rounding up “illegal” immigrants, as awful as that is.It’s been announced that they are going to deport around a quarter of a million Haitians, Salvadoran, Nicaraguans and Hondurans. And since there has been little outcry over this, I suspect that the Republicans see this form of bigotry as a pretty safe bet.
It would be really nice if an American majority could prove them wrong.
I’m sure you’ve all read everything about Michael Cohen’s secret slush fund full of millions of dollars from corporations and Russian oligarchs but if you haven’t I recommend this to get you started.
This is a new twist that I fined just amazing. One of the firms involved in closely tied to a major Russian oligarch with ties to the Kremlin and the man Manafort owes 20 milloion dollars Oleg Deripaska. They deny that he has any ties to this company owned by his American cousin but he even attended the inauguration.
Stormy Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti revealed Tuesday that Columbus Nova, a company based in New York, had funneled some $500,000 to Donald Trump’s longtime lawyer Michael Cohen. Avenatti suggested that the money may have helped cover the $130,000 spent on keeping Daniels quiet about her alleged affair with Trump.
However, the revelations aren’t limited solely to news about a Russia-linked company sending substantial sums to the president’s lawyer. As NBC reported Wednesday morning, Columbus Nova also spent 2016 and 2017 registering a number of websites aimed at young white supremacists, or members of the so-called “alt-right.”
Among the URLs registered were domains like Alt-Right.co, Altrights.co, Alternate-rt.com, and Alt-rite.com. Some of the domains, like Alt-Right.com and Altrights.co, were registered in late August 2016 — just a few months before the American election — while others, like Alt-rite.com, were created in August 2017.
alt-right (dot) co
alternate-rt (dot) com
alt-rite (dot) com
(7 other variations on that theme)
Plus these!
1-800getalife (dot) com
carlcuck (dot) com
cnnjournal (dot) com https://twitter.com/profcarroll/status/994072516820914183 …
However, a number of the domains were registered with a specific Columbus Nova email address that appears to belong to a Columbus Nova employee named Frederick Intrater.
It is unclear how, or if, Frederick Intrater is related Columbus Nova CEO Andrew Intrater — who is Vekselberg’s cousin — but on his LinkedIn profile, Frederick Intrater lists himself as the Design Manager at Columbus Nova. CorporationWiki also lists Frederick Intrater as the “coordinator of marketing” for “Renova Unitedstates Management.”
Frederick Intrater did not respond to ThinkProgress’ request for comment via phone and email.
There are other, non-white supremacist sites also registered via Columbus Nova accounts. Many of the links are dead or don’t have anything on their sites. At least one, however — registered at 1-800getalife.com — reroutes directly to Intrater.com, a site that now has nothing on it.
However, according to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, Intrater.com belonged to Frederick Intrater through at least March of this year, highlighting his design skills.
It remains unclear why Columbus Nova or Frederick Intrater would have been interested in registering sites aimed at young white supremacists. However, as ThinkProgress found earlier Wednesday, it wouldn’t be the first time Columbus Nova has attempted to distance itself from scandal — only to be tripped up by material online.
This nexus of white supremacy and Russian influence is where this story has significance on a global scale. The emergence of a hard right nationalism, pushed by certain actors (Russia especially) is the undertow on everything we’re experiencing right now.
Back in August of 2015, Donald Trump told Chuck Todd of “Meet the Press” that Iran is “going to be such a wealthy, such a powerful nation. They are going to have nuclear weapons. They are going to take over parts of the world that you wouldn’t believe. And I think it’s going to lead to nuclear holocaust.” However, he also said that as president he would not violate the nonproliferation agreement because “it’s very hard to say, ‘We’re ripping it up.’”
Trump went on to explain that had he been asked to use his masterful negotiating skills, the whole thing would have turned out differently. He would have never allowed Iran access to its money that had been frozen in Western banks for decades, he would have demanded the return off all prisoners before even agreeing to talk and he would have “doubled up” on the sanctions to really make them hurt. The logic seems to be that once the Iranians felt the lash of the mighty Trump, they would come crawling to him and beg for mercy. Only then would he “negotiate” and America would win and they would lose, which is how it must be.
He was asked who he turns to for foreign policy advice and he famously replied, “Well, I watch the shows. You know, when you watch your show and all of the other shows and you have the generals.” When pressed to name someone specific, the first person he mentioned was Fox News analyst and former UN ambassador John Bolton.
We all laughed at his silliness back then. We aren’t laughing now. President Trump announced on Tuesday that he was instructing the government to violate the Iran deal and reinstitute the economic sanctions (and add some more). He issued one of his patented bellicose threats, saying that despite the U.S. imposing renewed sanctions and tearing up the agreement, Iran is still expected to comply with its terms. He said that if the Iranian regime “continues its nuclear aspirations, it will have bigger problems than it has ever had before.” He didn’t say he would rain down fire and fury, but it was certainly implied.
Trump seems to believe that his angry tweets at “little Rocket Man” have brought Kim Jong-un to his knees, and it is a foregone conclusion that the North Korean dictator will surrender his nuclear weapons. Indeed, in Trump’s mind this has already happened. He’s been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, after all. So naturally, the Iranian government is terrified and will scurry to ingratiate itself with him too.
Despite his feeble protestations early on of not “just tearing up” the Iran deal, it’s obvious that he’s been dying to do it for quite some time, if only to complete his primary task: Erasing Barack Obama’s legacy. This deal was Obama’s biggest foreign policy achievement, so naturally it had to go. Furthermore, Trump had managed to fire virtually everyone who had argued in favor of America keeping its word and is back to being advised by Bolton, the man he always liked on “the shows.” Mind you, Bolton doesn’t just want to tear up the Iran deal, he wants to set it aflame with a hellfire missile.
Maybe Trump really is the colossus astride the globe who will bring world peace through bombastic tweeting and crude personal insults. But if that doesn’t work, nobody is really sure what comes next. The president certainly can’t articulate it. He couldn’t even explain why he believes this will make America safer:
Back in April of 2003, soon after the statues came down in Baghdad, David Remnick of The New Yorker wrote this:
There is little doubt that some of the most hawkish ideologues in and around the Bush Administration entertain dreams of a kind of endless war. James Woolsey, a former director of Central Intelligence who has been proposed as a Minister of Information in Iraq by Donald Rumsfeld, forecasts a Fourth World War (the third, of course, having been the Cold War), which will last “considerably longer” than either of the first two. One senior British official dryly told Newsweek before the invasion, “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.” And then, presumably, to Damascus, Beirut, Khartoum, Sanaa, Pyongyang. Richard Perle, one of the most influential advisers to the Pentagon, told an audience not long ago that, with a successful invasion of Iraq, “we could deliver a short message, a two-word message: ‘You’re next.’”
That’s even better than “You’re fired.”
John Bolton was a true believer in that idea, and there’s little reason to believe he has changed. He’s certainly for regime change in Iran. According to this article by Robert Mackey of The Intercept, a few months ago Bolton gave a big speech before the Iranian exile group known as the Mujahedeen Khalq, MEK or People’s Mujahedeen:
“The outcome of the president’s policy review should be to determine that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution will not last until its 40th birthday,” Bolton said. (The 40th anniversary of the Iranian revolution will be on February 11, 2019.) “The declared policy of the United States should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran,” Bolton added. “The behavior and the objectives of the regime are not going to change and, therefore, the only solution is to change the regime itself.”’
As the Iranian expatriate journalist Bahman Kalbasi noted, Bolton concluded his address to the exiles with a rousing promise: “And that’s why, before 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran!”
Trump didn’t mention regime change in his speech announcing that the U.S. planned to violate the terms of the JCPOA (as the Iran deal is officially known). But his legal adviser and unofficial foreign policy spokesman, Rudy Giuliani, recently appeared before the same group and assured it that the president is committed to overthrow as well, even leading the crowd to chant, “Regime change! Regime change!” He repeated that commitment just this past weekend:
“We have a president who is tough,” Giuliani said Saturday at a conference organized in Washington by the Organization of Iranian-American Communities. “We have a president who is as committed to regime change as we are.”
Trump is often understood as an old-time isolationist who just wants the U.S. to withdraw from the world so he can concentrate on mass deportations and graft. But that does not describe Bolton or Giuliani or anti-Muslim zealot Mike Pompeo, now the secretary of state, or any of the other hawks Trump has surrounded himself with. They are looking for a war. They are always looking for a war.
Really, Trump is too. He’s a bully. It’s his nature.
Republicans have one less sword hanging over their heads. In West Virginia last night, convicted coal executive Don Blankenship soundly lost his bid for run for U.S. Senate on the GOP ticket. Patrick Morrisey, the state’s attorney general, defeated U.S. Rep. Evan Jenkins and distant third, Don Blankenship. Morrisey will face incumbent Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin in the fall. By 70-30 Manchin defeated Paula Jean Swearengin who ran to the left of the conservative Democrat. A West Virginia U.S. Senate race that might have been months of embarrassment for the GOP (had Blankenship prevailed) could be a bigger challenge now for Manchin.
Former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chief Richard Cordray will be the Democrats’ candidate for Ohio governor, having defeated former congressman Dennis Kucinich in the state’s primary. Cordray had the endorsement of Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts while Kucinich drew support from Our Revolution, the activist group that grew from Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.
In North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, former Charlotte pastor Mark Harris upset incumbent Republican Rep. Robert Pittenger by two percentage points. Not only is Pittenger the first incumbent in the country to lose this year, but he lost to a nonincumbent opponent, according to the Raleigh News and Observer:
Pittenger, a former state senator first elected in 2012, was seeking a fourth term in the district that extends from southeast Charlotte east to Bladen County. In 2016 he defeated Harris by 134 votes, one of the country’s closest congressional races.
Harris cast the primary as a battle for “the heart and soul of the Republican Party.” He ran as much against the GOP-controlled Congress as against Pittenger. He said Pittenger was part of the Washington “swamp.”
Nevertheless, “each candidate portrayed himself as President Donald Trump’s more loyal supporter.” Considered a competitive race before last night, Pittenger’s defeat increases the chances Republicans will lose the House seat in November. Harris will face Democrat Dan McCready, a Marine Corps veteran and solar energy entrepreneur being compared to Pennsylvania’s Conor Lamb.
The year of the woman continues, as evidenced in candidates who prevailed last night:
Some of the seats are safely controlled by Republicans and will not be competitive this fall. But the success of candidates like Liz Watson in Indiana and Kathy Manning in North Carolina, and of female Democrats across the four states that voted on Tuesday, illustrates how much women are driving the opposition to President Trump.
There are more women who are Democratic House candidates this year than ever, and the first primaries of 2018, beginning with Texas and Illinois in March, have demonstrated that they are not just running — they are also winning nominations.
Finally, in a campaign fueled by his own money Mike Braun upset two better-known Republicans in Indiana’s U. S. Senate primary. The Indianapolis Star describes the primary as “the nation’s nastiest and most expensive.” Braun will face incumbent Democratic Senator Joe Donnelly in what is expected to be a competitive race for Democrats.
Next Tuesday: Idaho, Nebraska, Oregon and Pennsylvania.
* * * * * * * *
For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is now on President Trump’s legal team, told CBS News correspondent Paula Reid Monday that special counsel Robert Mueller’s office has rejected proposals to allow Mr. Trump to answer questions from investigators in writing.
The president’s legal team has signaled that this would be their preferred format for a possible interview, since it helps protect Mr. Trump from the possibility of lying or misleading investigators, which is a criminal offense.
Giuliani told CBS News it will take up to three weeks for him to get fully up to speed on the facts of the investigation and be prepared to engage in formal negotiations with the special counsel about the terms of a possible interview with Mr. Trump.
Giuliani told Reid that he and the president’s legal team continue to be in communication with the special counsel, but that he wants to have a better sense of the facts before engaging in formal negotiations about a possible interview.
Giuliani said Mr. Trump’s team also wants some issues to be off-limits, although he wouldn’t elaborate on which ones, and they want a time limit for the interview.
In addition, Giuliani also told Reid he’d want to know whether the interview would become public, and whether they would have the chance to issue a rebuttal to anything alleged by the special counsel.
Stunning that Mueller doesn’t think Trump can be trusted to answer the questions on the honor system. He’s as honest as the day is long —- in the arctic, on the winter solstice.
I’m sure they’re worried that the interview will become public. After all, that’s what the backstabbing Republicans would do. Indeed, they did. They told Clinton that his Grand Jury testimony had to be taped for a juror who was out sick — and then Starr turned the ape over to the Republicans in congress and they released it to the public.
Giuliani says he needs to prep Trump and it will take time so he wants to wait until after the North Korean Summit because Trump is spending his time being briefed on that.
“Mr. President, how does this America safer?” she said. “How does this make American safer?”
Trump gathered his thoughts for a moment, then just restated the question in the form of an assertion.
“This will make America much safer,” he said, before getting up for the table on which he signed the memorandum.
Watch:
The president’s inability to answer the most basic question about his decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear agreement is indicative of why many experts question the wisdom of doing so in the first place. Under the Joint Cooperation Plan of Action (JCPOA), the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency could regularly inspect Iran’s nuclear program to make sure that it is for peaceful purposes. By all accounts, that process was working. But now that Trump has pulled the U.S. out, it’s unclear what will come next.
During a speech that preceded the memorandum signing, Trump struck a threatening tone, at one point vowing that “if the regime continues its nuclear aspirations, it will have bigger problems than it has ever had before.”
Sen. John McCain should reconsider his wish that President Donald Trump not attend McCain’s funeral, said Sen. Orrin Hatch, the most senior GOP senator.
McCain prefers instead that Vice President Mike Pence attend his funeral rather than Trump, who has mocked McCain for being tortured and attacked him for voting against Obamacare repeal. But Hatch said he thought keeping the president from his funeral was too much: “I think it’s ridiculous.”
“Well, he’s the president of the United States and he’s a very good man. But it’s up to [McCain]. I think John should have his own wishes fulfilled with regard to who attends the funeral,” said the Utah senator. Asked whether McCain should change his mind about Trump, Hatch said: “I would.”
Hatch said he does not expect McCain, who is battling brain cancer, to return to the Senate.
“That’s what I’ve been told,” said Hatch, who is 84 and retiring after this year. “I don’t know. I hope he does, I hope he can.”
What an asshole.
He seems to genuinely love Donald Trump which I think clears up whether or not he was ever the “moderate” the Villagers always tried to say he was. He’s become his essence: a mean old man. He always was one.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has apologized to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for saying it was “ridiculous” for McCain to request that President Trump not attend his funeral, a remark that drew a swift rebuke from McCain’s daughter Meghan McCain.
“I agree with the daughter,” a remorseful Hatch told The Washington Post on Tuesday. “I shouldn’t have said anything yesterday. I agree a hundred percent with her.”
Hatch also sent a letter to McCain apologizing for his comment and for suggesting that McCain would not return to the Senate, according to a person familiar with its contents.
By abandoning the Iran deal, the Trump administration has just isolated the United States, alienated our allies, and manufactured a slow-motion crisis with no strategy—short of war—to address it. pic.twitter.com/U0NOBqX1Nj
— National Security Action (@natsecaction) May 8, 2018
Rob Malley, who coordinated Middle East policy in the Obama administration, observed that Bolton’s appointment, along with the nomination of Iran deal critic Mike Pompeo as secretary of state, seemed to signal that the agreement would most likely be “dead and buried” within months. Trita Parsi, leader of the National Iranian American Council wrote on Twitter: “People, let this be very clear: The appointment of Bolton is essentially a declaration of war with Iran. With Pompeo and Bolton, Trump is assembling a WAR CABINET.”
Their alarm was understandable. Bolton, who made his name as a belligerent member of George W. Bush’s State Department and a Fox News contributor, has not only demanded that the Trump administration withdraw from the nuclear deal, he also previously advocated bombing Iran instead. Bolton has spent the better part of a decade calling for the United States to help overthrow the theocratic government in Tehran and hand power to a cult-like group of Iranian exiles with no real support inside the country.
Just eight months ago, at a Paris gathering, Bolton told members of the Iranian exile group, known as the Mujahedeen Khalq, MEK, or People’s Mujahedeen, that the Trump administration should embrace their goal of immediate regime change in Iran and recognize their group as a “viable” alternative.
“The outcome of the president’s policy review should be to determine that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution will not last until its 40th birthday,” Bolton said. (The 40th anniversary of the Iranian revolution will be on February 11, 2019.) “The declared policy of the United States should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran,” Bolton added. “The behavior and the objectives of the regime are not going to change and, therefore, the only solution is to change the regime itself.”
As the Iranian expatriate journalist Bahman Kalbasi noted, Bolton concluded his address to the exiles with a rousing promise: “And that’s why, before 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran!”
To understand how extraordinary it is that the man about to become the president’s most senior national security official made this promise to the MEK, it is important to know that, until recently, the Iranian dissidents had spent three decades trying to achieve their aims through violence, including terrorist attacks.
After members of the MEK helped foment the 1979 revolution, in part by killing American civilians working in Tehran, the group then lost a bitter struggle for power to the Islamists led by the revolution’s leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. With its leadership forced to flee Iran in 1981, the MEK’s members set up a government-in-exile in France and established a military base in Iraq, where they were given arms and training by Saddam Hussein, as part of a strategy to destabilize the government in Tehran that he was at war with.
In recent years, as The Intercept has reported, the MEK has poured millions of dollars into reinventing itself as a moderate political group ready to take power in Iran if Western-backed regime change ever takes place. To that end, it lobbied successfully to be removed from the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations in 2012. The Iranian exiles achieved this over the apparent opposition of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in part by paying a long list of former U.S. officials hefty speaking fees of between $10,000 to $50,000 for hymns of praise like the one Bolton delivered last July.
Your president, ladies and gentlemen:
Trump can’t answer a reporter’s question about “how this makes America safer,” instead just asserts: “This will make America safer.” #IranDealpic.twitter.com/T8RZXksYao
