The Obama-Hezbollah scandal The Stream reported on last week is now drawing the attention of Congress and the Justice Department. (But not the mainstream media. They’re as tight-lipped with the story as the Colonel is with his secret recipe.)

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has ordered DOJ to investigate whether President Obama blocked DEA efforts to stop the terrorist group from smuggling tons of cocaine into the United States. Congress has also vowed to look into the scandal.

To refresh: POLITICO revealed how Obama had torpedoed an eight-year operation called Project Cassandra that was tasked with taking down the drug and weapons-running network. The purpose? According to an Obama Treasury official, Cassandra was “tamped down for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.”

A former CIA officer set the scene:

During the negotiations, early on, [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. It was a strategic decision to show good faith toward the Iranians in terms of reaching an agreement.

We’re not talking about turning a blind eye to an Iranian diplomat caught with a couple ounces. We’re talking about a mountain of powder high enough for Shaun White to snowboard down. A billion-dollar-a-year enterprise in partnership with Latin American drug gangs with the profits going straight into the pockets of terrorists. And not just any terrorists. Counter-terrorism experts consider Hezbollah the “A-Team” of terror organizations. These are the same people behind the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, killing 241 of our finest. Just this past June two Hezbollah agents were busted scouting possible targets in New York City, along with the U.S. and Israeli embassies in Panama.

No wonder Sessions is calling this “a significant issue for the protection of Americans.” Sessions said “Operations designed to investigate and prosecute terrorist organizations that are also fueling that drug crisis must be paramount in this administration.” You’d think that would be paramount in any administration.

Obama Officials Smearing

Initially, Obama officials told POLITICO those making the allegations didn’t understand the big picture. “I get the feeling people who don’t know what’s going on in the broader universe are grasping at straws,” said an Obama national security advisor. “The world is a lot more complicated than viewed through the narrow lens of drug trafficking.”

However, now they are in attack mode … and sharing the same talking point.

From former National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor: “The story is so manufactured out of thin air that it’s hard to push back except to say that it’s a figment of the imagination of two very flawed sources.”

From former State Department spokesman Marie Harf: She said she’d never heard of Project Cassandra. “They quote a couple of low-level ideological sources who clearly don’t like the Iran deal.”

Obama special assistant Ned Price attacked writer Josh Meyer for his “anti-Iran deal screed” “based on pure speculation by these ‘1 or 2 sources’ with undisclosed anti-Iran deal bias.”

The not-credible sources talking point is nonsense. The two men they’re slurring headed Project Cassandra. Furthermore, Meyer conducted dozens of interviews, quoted a sea of sources, examined countless documents. Meaning, a second talking point is needed. In this case, the old reliable “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Former Center for American Progress VP Joe Cirincione called it a “shabby neocon hit piece.” Brian O’Toole of the Atlantic Council called it “a disgusting hit job by both the cabal of people with this agenda and by the reporter who paid lip service to the criticisms of this group.”

Remember, POLITICO is a left-leaning news organization. And as the Washington Free Beacon noted, reporter Meyer is “not an ideologue, not a partisan, not a quack.” He’s a veteran of both the Los Angeles Times and NBC News.

Meyer himself fought back:

To say that the people that I quoted were low-level people is sort of ridiculous. These were the people that led this task force. They were not ideologues. They’re not flawed. … This is not a story in 14,000 words where I was just taking some ‘spin’ from some people. This spent months of meticulous reporting to document what was happening– talking to people outside the administration–and so I challenge people to let me know what the specifics are that they think aren’t true.

As of yet, no one has taken up Meyers’ challenge. Don’t expect them to. The Obama team and their media minions are running the Democratic Scandal Playbook.

1. Ignore the story. (As CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC did)
2. When story gets too big, attack the sources, attack the messenger, call it right-wing conspiracy.
3. When more sources come forward and evidence proves overwhelming, tell us it’s “Old news. Debunked. It’s just a deflection from Mueller’s investigation into Trump.” And of course, “What difference, at this point, does it make?!”

Ben Rhodes and the Road Ahead

Leading the charge against Meyer’s report is former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes. He calls the exposé “Non-fact based anti-Iran deal propaganda” out of the “right wing echo chamber.”

There is boundless irony and hypocrisy in how much people who love to sneer at "echo chambers" live entirely inside a perpetual right wing echo chamber of non-fact based anti Iran Deal propaganda. https://t.co/mMw1Zk4Ckv

— Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) December 20, 2017

Of course, Rhodes has a big, snarling dog in the hunt. He crafted Obama’s sales pitch for the Iran deal. He as much as admitted to New York Times Magazine that the pitch was a fraud. (“Actively mislead,” is the term used by the NY Times author.)

• That Obama telling Congress and the American people the choice was between the deal he had negotiated or war with Iran was bogus.
• That Obama was negotiating with newly risen-up moderates in Iran. (There’s no such thing as moderate in power in Iran. The Mullahs’ of “moderate” is someone who wants “Death to America” quickly rather than via slow, excruciating torture.) In fact, the White House even lied about that. Negotiations began under former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Islamist extremist who’s part of a Shi’ite sect eager to bring about Armageddon.
• Rhodes boasted he had an easy time getting the White House press corp to go along with this — and any other tale he concocted —because they were too ignorant and too in the tank to discover the truth. (Rhodes also came up with the “It’s a video’s fault” storyline on Benghazi.) “We created an echo chamber,” Rhodes said, “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

Unfortunately for Rhodes, misleading Congress isn’t like over-hyping a beer on TV. Secretly coddling an enemy that shouts “Death to America” by letting their terror wing smuggle drugs into our country, all to sell a nuclear deal to Congress on a false premise, is serious business.

And Congress is now on the case. Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) of the House Oversight Committee told the Washington Free Beacon he and top lawmakers are:

examining evidence that could implicate top former Obama officials, including National Security Council official Ben Rhodes, the architect of the former administration’s self-described pro-Iran “echo chamber.”

Lawmakers will be paying particular attention to whether Rhodes or other senior officials accused of misleading Congress and the American public about the Iran deal played a role in thwarting the Hezbollah investigation.

And Where is the Media?

Deathly quiet, for the most part. ABC News posted the AP wire story on Sessions’ request for an investigation. However, the CBS News and NBC News websites still have nothing on POLITICO’s bombshell. CNN? Nothing. MSNBC? Zilch. Nada. Bupkus.

If Donald Trump had let a Russian rent space at Trump Tower for a New Year’s Eve Party, CNN would have 24/7 coverage. Rachel Maddow would launch a hunger strike. Joe and Mika would honeymoon outside his hotels in protest.

But for a Democrat president allowing terrorists to run a billion-dollar coke smuggling business in the U.S.? It’s Silent Night.