Eli Lake at Bloomberg noticed an interesting thing about some of the people propelled into power by Trump’s presidential victory – they have been wanting to reveal Obama’s Iran Deal secrets and they might have the chance to do it now:
For years, many Republicans and conservatives have charged that President Barack Obama was shielding embarrassing intelligence and policy details about Iran in order to support the nuclear deal reached last year.
With Donald Trump’s upset victory, the party of Lincoln will have an opportunity to declassify and disclose this information. While no decisions have been made, two early picks to Trump’s cabinet suggest this is going to happen.
Let’s start with retired general Michael Flynn, the next president’s choice to be national security adviser. Flynn served for two years as Obama’s director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014. Just as relevant, however, is that in 2011 he ran a team at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that reviewed the troves of material captured in the 2011 Osama bin Laden raid.
Under Obama, the intelligence community has declassified a small fraction of those documents and released them in drips and drabs. This prompted Flynn, after he retired in 2014, to charge that the disclosures were selective. Flynn has said in interviews and writings that some documents captured in the bin Laden raid showed a much tighter relationship between Iran and al-Qaeda than previously disclosed.
Lake goes on to identify Mike Pompeo as another aide that would be interested in releasing those secrets. If that information is released, then you can bet that it would have a huge effect on Obama’s legacy, and not for the good. And would Trump cherry pick the info to accentuate the worst parts of the Iran Deal in order to scrap it? Looks like we might find out soon…