How Obama Lied Us Into the Iranian ShowdownAided by Journalists, said an Obama aide, who "literally know nothing.”
Jack Cashill
Jun 17, 2025Pundits on the right might want to take a break from their heathy, if not exactly helpful, squabbling to remember how we got to where we are and who deserves the blame.
A useful starting date is July 14, 2015, the day United States signed on to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or, for our purposes, the Iran deal. President Barack Obama saw the deal as his signature foreign policy achievement and gave away the farm to secure it. In addition to lifting sanctions on Iran, the U.S. paid the Iranians $1.7 billion in cash.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin smiled approvingly. The New York Times noted Russia’s “lightning effort to capitalize on the deal.” The Russians had been indispensable, and they knew it.
As Obama told Tom Friedman of the New York Times, “We would have not achieved this agreement had it not been for Russia’s willingness to stick with us and the other P5-Plus members in insisting on a strong deal.” In July 2015, it was still respectable for an American president to cozy up to the soon to be monstrous but always opportunistic Putin.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not as pleased as Putin. Two years earlier, when the Iran deal was first put on the table, Netanyahu said, “What was concluded in Geneva last night is not a historic agreement, it’s a historic mistake.” As proposed, the deal would have Iran “taking only cosmetic steps which it could reverse easily within a few weeks, and in return, sanctions that took years to put in place are going to be eased.” For the next two years, as the administration maneuvered to seal the deal, Obama and his aides worked to neutralize those who might agree with Netanyahu.
James Rosen, then chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, felt the heat. Rosen had been on the White House hit list for years. In 2010, the Department of Justice used a search warrant to probe Rosen’s personal and professional communications. So invasive was the DOJ’s surveillance that it moved even the Washington Post, if not to condemn the action, at least to report it. “Search warrants like these have a severe chilling effect on the free flow of important information to the public.”
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