Hezbollah’s drug trafficking and money-laundering operations were allegedly allowed by the Obama administration in order to make sure the Iran nuclear deal remained intact, a Politico report said on Monday.
The report says that an anti-Hezbollah law enforcement campaign, known as Project Cassandra, which was intended to stop drug trafficking was derailed by the former president’s administration with the sole purpose of securing the nuke deal.
It also added that by thwarting the covert operation, the administration enabled Hezbollah’s rise from a criminal enterprise into a serious global security threat.
“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision. They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down,” said David Asher, a Defense Department finance analyst who helped establish Project Cassandra.
According to Politico, Project Cassandra’s leaders were on multiple occasions stopped by the Justice and Treasury Department from investigating, prosecuting and arresting individuals. This resulted in Hezbollah operatives conducting illicit operations freely. The report adds that this included a major cocaine trafficker who was supplying weapons used by Syria’s Bashar al-Assad against his own citizens.
Former Obama administration officials said that their decisions were motivated by prospects of improving relations with Iran as well as stalling the country’s nuclear weapons program, but rejected the idea that they “derailed” actions against Hezbollah out of politics.
“There has been a consistent pattern of actions taken against Hezbollah, both through tough sanctions and law enforcement actions before and after the Iran deal,” said Kevin Lewis who worked at the White House and the Justice Department during the Obama administration.
However, he added that the closer they got to securing the nuclear deal with Iran, the more difficult it became to conduct Hezbollah investigations.
“The closer we got to the [Iran deal], the more these activities went away. 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,” he said.
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