A brief refresher.
Obama campaigned on pulling out of Iraq and doubling down on Afghanistan. The strategy made absolutely no sense. The pullout from Iraq led to the rise of ISIS. Meanwhile Obama lied about the scale of the Al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan. American soldiers were sent in with their hands tied behind their backs to win the hearts and minds of the Afghans. A failed peace process, via Qatar, was a disaster. And the United States lost far more people in Afghanistan under Obama than under Bush. So Obama went all in on trying to appease the Taliban.
Here's another snapshot of the most scandal free administration ever.
The document — a 240-page draft prosecution memo and 700 pages of supporting evidence — was the result of 10 years of DEA investigations done in conjunction with U.S. and allied military forces, working with embassy legal advisers from the departments of Justice and State. In May 2013, it was endorsed by the top Justice Department official in Kabul, who recommended it be sent to DOJ’s specialized Terrorism and International Narcotics unit in Manhattan. After agents flew in from Kabul for a three-hour briefing, the unit enthusiastically accepted the case and assigned one of its best and most experienced prosecutors to spearhead it.
“These are the most worthy of targets to pursue,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Adam Fee, who had successfully prosecuted some of the FARC cases, wrote in an email to Seaman.
But before Fee could pack for his first trip to Afghanistan, Operation Reciprocity was shut down.
Its demise was not instantaneous. But the most significant blow, by far, came on May 27, 2013, when the then-deputy chief of mission, Ambassador Tina Kaidanow, summoned Marsac and two top embassy officials supporting the plan to her office, and issued an immediate stand-down order...
And the White House’s overriding priority ahead of the drawdown, she told POLITICO, was to use all tools at its disposal “to try and find a way to promote lasting stability in Afghanistan,” with peace talks integral to that effort. “So the bottom line is it had to be factored into whatever else was going on,” she said of the Taliban indictment plan. “We look at that entire array of considerations and think, you know, does it make sense in the moment? Does it make sense later on? Does it makes sense at all?”...
The authors believe the real reason it was shut down was fears it would jeopardize the administration’s efforts to engage the Taliban in peace talks and still-secret prisoner swap negotiations involving U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. They tried to revive the effort after Kaidanow transferred back to Washington that fall, but by then, they say, circumstances had changed and the project never gained traction again.
Recently, Seaman came forward to say that he and his former colleagues had all but given up on Operation Reciprocity until they discovered that the Trump administration had established a special task force to review and resurrect Hezbollah drug trafficking cases after a POLITICO report disclosed that they were derailed by the Obama administration’s determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran.
There's a pattern here. And if Mueller weren't busy being Hillary's bagboy, he might take a closer look at it. We do have a pattern of Obama shutting down drug investigations of Islamic terrorists.