A former Bush White House official is calling on congress and the media to look into the Obama administration’s former correspondence with deceased terrorist kingpin Qassem Soleimani. He also urged former senior members of the Obama administration to divulge all they know about the messages and agree to have them declassified.
Michael Doran, a senior director in President Bush’s National Security Council, declared on Twitter that he “must become a whistleblower” and reveal that “the Obama admin sent letters – plural – directly to Soleimani.”
Doran told American Greatness that he was poking fun at how the Democrats’ had “packaged and marketed” their so-called “whistleblower,” but was dead serious about his contention that the Obama administration had corresponded with the designated terrorist.
He provided no specific details about the correspondence, but said on Twitter that he knew for “a fact” that the letters were sent.
“[John] Kerry would have us believe that the JCPOA [Iran Nuclear Deal] contained rather than enabled Iran,” Doran wrote, linking to the former Sec. of State’s oped Thursday in the New York Times. “In response to this ludicrous and reckless contention, I must become a whistleblower. I know for a fact that the Obama admin sent letters – plural – directly to Soleimani.”
Doran, a foreign policy expert at the Hudson Institute, went on to challenge the former Obama officials to reveal and declassify their known correspondence with Iranian leaders Ali Khamenei and Hassan Rouhani.
“Now that the public has a better understanding of who Qassem Soleimani was, it has a right to understand the messages in context,” Doran wrote.
He went on to argue that if President Trump’s telephone conversation with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky required public scrutiny, “then surely we are justified in seeing the messages to Soleimani.” Doran added: “Obama officials, we know, have nothing to hide. They say they’re proud of their Iran “containment” policy, so why would they pose any obstacle?”
In his NY Times piece, Kerry went out of his way to declare that Suleimani “was a sworn, unapologetic enemy of the United States, “a cagey field marshal who oversaw Iran’s long strategy to extend the country’s influence through sectarian proxies in the region.”
Soleimani was the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force, a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.
“Qasem Soleimani was the architect of terrorist attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere which killed hundreds of United States personnel, including with weapons and improvised explosives provided directly by the IRGC-QF,” a Senate resolution praising the successful mission to eliminate the terror mastermind states.
” … Soleimani planned or supported numerous other deadly terrorist attacks against the United States and its allies, including the 2011 plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States Adel Al-Jubeir while he was in the United States and the December 31, 2019 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, as well as planned attacks in Germany, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Kenya, Bahrain, Turkey, and elsewhere.”
Kerry stressed in his piece that Soleimani “won’t be mourned or missed by anyone in the West, but added. “Occasionally, when American and Iranian interests aligned, as they did in fighting ISIS, we were the serendipitous beneficiaries of his relationships and levers, as were the Iraqis. But this was a rare exception.”