Category Archives: The Denise Simon Experience

DOJ: Lawyers Behind the N. Carolina Bathroom Lawsuit

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Radicals….throughout the whole Justice Department but here are the backgrounds of those who Loretta Lynch has assigned to sue North Carolina on the bathroom (genderless) lawsuit. Terrifying….

The Justice Department sent out the guidance letter to public schools in several languages and that document is here.

This is a matter placed under Title IX, Sex Discrimination.

By the way, make sure you use proper words as you could be sued in this regard as well.

A sign marks the entrance to a gender-neutral restroom at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vt.

These Are the Radical DOJ Lawyers Suing North Carolina Over Transgender Bathroom Use

By J. Christian Adams

PJ Media published the Every Single One series in 2011. The series documented the Obama administration’s hiring of radical lawyers to fill the career ranks in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

Every single one of the new attorney hires were radical leftists or partisans.

Since 2011, the situation has only gotten worse. Much worse.

The Civil Rights Division exercises enormous power over the everyday lives of Americans: they are involved in employment, education, housing, religious liberty, abortion, prisons, policing, and much, much more.

The radical beliefs of these radical lawyers have turned into radical administration policies.

The most recent example? The lawsuits aimed at North Carolina intended to create a federal civil right for men to use women’s bathrooms and locker rooms.

We have already provided the resumes of the new lawyers who will oversee the 2016 elections. Now let’s meet the ones who want to oversee bathrooms.

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The complaint filed by North Carolina had Justice Department lawyers from the Employment Litigation section as well as other DOJ Civil Rights Division sections.

Chief Delora Kennebrew

The Employment Section is headed by Delora Kennebrew.

Kennebrew hails from Savannah, Georgia. She was president of the Black Law Student Association at Mercer University’s law school in Macon.

Under Kennebrew, the Employment Section has pursued case after case against fire departments and other municipal entities, forcing them to abandon qualification tests where blacks and Hispanics scored lower than whites. Other settlements have forced municipalities to pay tens of thousands of dollars for using qualification tests for fire and police jobs.

One case she oversaw against Austin, Texas, forced the city to set aside 30 jobs for black and Hispanic applicants.

Kennebrew is listed as the point of contact in the letter North Carolina received from the Justice Department this month. That means she is the central manager on the matter.

Kennebrew is most certainly a member of the Senior Executive Service. That means that an incoming Trump administration can move her after January 2017 to any other federal agency in any part of the country, such as the National Weather Service in Duluth.

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Candyce Phoenix

Candyce Phoenix is also on the complaint suing North Carolina.

Her resume noted her senior thesis was devoted to a “case study of race and FedEx field,” the football stadium where the Washington Redskins play.

Phoenix majored in “Comparative Ethnic Studies” at Columbia, where she was a columnist for the student newspaper. You can read her writings here. Her favorite topics? Race, race, and race.

In a column titled “Hear Ye, Hear Ye, All Negroes,” she wrote about President George Bush’s “bogus” visit to Howard University:

[Bush] was ecstatic to be able to visit the Negroes on such an important occasion. Needless to say, Bush was not well received, which was to be expected given his recent two percent approval rating among African Americans. One of my classmates said it best when she complained that having Bush on campus was “like inviting the master to the slave cabins for dinner.”

Phoenix also penned “It Was Raining Oreos,” which refers to former RNC Chairman Michael Steele with a racial epithet. She wrote “What I Learned from White People at Howard” (she learned the best ones are “race traitors”). She also wrote “I’m Black,” which stated: “Our curriculum places disproportionate importance on white scholars and effectively denies the importance of scholars of color.”

Yes, yes, we heard it all before. But these are the sort of views held by lawyers earning six-figure taxpayer-funded salaries to fundamentally transform America.

The race-soaked discontent with America no longer is confined to crackpots on campus.

Candyce Phoenix Candyce Phoenix

Phoenix’s qualifications didn’t end with her tiresome critical race studies dogma. She was an activist from the start. Phoenix served as the “United Students of Color Campus Liaison” at Columbia — a real office.

She served as the events chair for the American Constitution Society, a left-wing lawyers club that has mostly failed in its efforts to match the heft and influence of the Federalist Society. She worked with the left-wing “Election Protection” organization, which funnels potential plaintiffs toward civil rights organizations.

She also did a stint with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, an organization that routinely fights election integrity laws like Voter ID. (Thankfully, those efforts have recently failed, such as in North Carolina.)

Now, buckle up:

After a Danish cartoonist was nearly murdered by an Islamist with an axe, Phoenix wrote to the Washington Post:

[D]o Muslims really have avenues to express their discontent by what we consider normal democratic means? And if they do, do we listen?

Phoenix started at DOJ less than a year ago, which means she hasn’t vested into civil service protections and can also be moved by a new administration.

Alisa Philo

Philo, hired in October 2015, was co-president of Women of Stanford Law, an organization with a “Social Justice Committee” that organizes “donation based efforts and social justice programing” at Stanford Law School.

Alisa Philo

Philo clerked for First Circuit Court of Appeal Judge Sandra Lynch (appointed by Clinton) and federal Judge Keith Ellison (Clinton). Philo also began her tenure at Justice less than a year ago; she too has not vested her employment.

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Nadia Said

Said was a fellow at Equal Justice America, but her real Civil Rights Division bona fides came from her time spent at the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights.

The Chicago Lawyers’ Committee was originally designed to end official discrimination, but it has since morphed into a Tides Foundation, Soros-funded leftist organization pushing radical legal theories.

The group has opposed election-integrity measures. It has deployed teams of lawyers to polling locations ostensibly to protect voting rights, but in practice to aid Democrats.

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Christina Cheung

Christina Cheung says she worked as a political consultant prior to her hiring at the Justice Department in 2015. Since becoming a Justice Department lawyer, she has also become a Hillary Clinton donor. When working with Gloria Allred in private practice, Cheung was involved in attempts to torque campus sexual assault cases against universities such as Boise State.

Christina Cheung

That complaint said colleges are required to “take proactive measures to prevent sexual harassment and violence,” and that “the mere presence” of an accused perpetrator on campus “gives rise to a sexually hostile atmosphere.”

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Richard Sexton

Sexton came to the Justice Department from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commision. While at the EEOC, he brought cases against businesses such as Service Master, Terminix, Subway franchises, and prison management companies.

Richard Sexton

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Catherine Sellers

Sellers worked at “Legal Voice,” a group in Seattle dedicated to “transgender rights,” “protecting reproductive justice,” and “advancing economic justice.”

The resume Sellers submitted to the Justice Department for employment consideration documents her time at the Yale University Art Gallery. Wrote Sellers:

Recruited diverse student groups to co-host gallery events and organized “Yale Liberal Party debate on art repatriation, Day With(out) Art” event recognizing LBGT artists and a collaborative tour focusing on women’s issues.

She was involved in the Immigrant Families Advocacy Project, a group dedicated to providing legal services to illegal aliens.

See below: the Justice Department does not want you to see her entire resume. They redacted a portion pertaining to “interests”:

Catherine Sellers

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Kunti Dudakia Salazar

Kunti Dudakia Salazar was an A-team leftist activist before she came to the Justice Department in June of 2015. She graduated summa cum laude with a Woman’s Studies degree from UCLA. There, she was active in both the African student union as well as the Indian student union. She also won the Constance Coiner award for “research on feminist/working class issues.”

Kunti Dudakia Salazar

At law school in Berkeley, she was a founding member of the “Women of Color Collective,” a group dedicated to providing “a supportive space for African-American, Asian-American, Latina, Native-American, and other women and transgender students of color.” Hard to imagine that could have been in short supply at Berkeley.

The Facebook page for the organization toggles between farce and frightening, reframing the student experience through the lens of race and oppression.

She also worked for the Henderson Center for Social Justice on issues “regarding black women, mental health and incarceration,” and served as the “activist coordinator” for the “Berkeley Critical Race Studies Scholars Society.”

She worked for the ACLU in Los Angeles on “racial profiling” and “police misconduct” issues.

The Justice Department also redacted her interests, as well as the name of a professor — David Sklansky — with whom she worked on a law review article.

Dudakia Salazar began her time at the Justice Department in June 2015, and thus her probationary period has not yet ended.

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Stay tuned to learn about the other Civil Rights Division sections suing North Carolina over trans rights.

More than 100 McAuliffe/Clinton Donations

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Feds Reportedly Examining More Than 100 Donations Made to Both Clinton Foundation and McAuliffe Campaign

LawNewz: Federal investigators are reportedly examining more than 100 donations made to both the Clinton Foundation and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s campaign as part of a larger probe into whether McAuliffe’s campaign accepted illegal contributions.

McAuliffe is a longtime friend to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, having previously served as Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign chairman and as a board member of the Clinton Global Initiative, a part of the Clinton Foundation.

A report by CNN on Monday indicated that federal investigators have spent the past year examining whether McAuliffe’s 2013 gubernatorial campaign accepted illegal contributions.  The probe is reportedly focused on contributions made by Chinese businessman Wang Wenliang.  However, sources familiar with the probe also told CNN “investigators have scrutinized McAuliffe’s time as a board member of the Clinton Global Initiative, a vehicle of the charitable foundation set up by former President Bill Clinton.”

Adding to the initial report, federal officials reportedly told NBC News late on Monday that investigators are examining more than 100 contributions made to both the Clinton Foundation and McAuliffe’s 2013 campaign. Wang is reportedly one of the individuals who made overlapping contributions, pledging $2 million dollars to the Clinton Foundation and another $120,000 McAuliffe’s campaign.

There is currently no allegation of wrongdoing on the part of the Clinton Foundation, according to the reports.  The investigation is said to be focused on McAuliffe and campaign contributions.  Federal law prohibits campaigns from accepting contributions from foreign nationals.  However, a spokesman told CNN that Wang has permanent resident status which makes him eligible to make campaign donations.

On Monday, a lawyer for the campaign denied any wrongdoing and promised McAuliffe would cooperate with the investigation.  McAuliffe issued his own statement on Tuesday morning denying any wrongdoing and saying he is “confident” Wang is a legitimate donor.  According to Politico, the statement reads, in part: 

This has nothing to do with the Clinton Foundation. This was an allegation of a gentleman who gave a check to my campaign. I didn’t bring the donor in. I didn’t bring him into the Clinton Foundation. I’m not even sure if I’ve ever met the person, to be honest with you. I know the folks that worked at his company. Has nothing to do with the Clinton Foundation. And I can tell you this, I’ve worked and helped the president on the foundation. I’ve traveled all over the globe with Bill Clinton. And you go to Africa and other places around the globe and you look what he has done for children, health clinics, AIDS research all over the globe, it really is something to see. I’ve traveled to Malawi and seen him with young women businesses over there. They have really done great spectacular work to help people’s lives. And that’s what’s what he’s focused on. He’s done a great job and honestly I’m very proud to be part of it.

****

The investigation also involves the Clinton Foundation, according to CNN. CBS reported last year that Wang’s company, Rilin Enterprises, pledged in 2013 to give the organization $2 million. CNN noted that there is “no allegation” of impropriety on the foundation’s part and that McAuliffe formerly served on its board. Last year, the foundation’s decision to accept Wang’s company’s pledge drew pointed criticism because of Wang’s ties to the Chinese government—the billionaire used to be a delegate to the country’s parliament.

“Indirectly the Clinton Foundation has political influence, that’s why people give to it,” Jim Mann, former Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, told CBS. “People give to the Clinton Foundation particularly because it is the Clintons and because they are prominent politicians in the United States.”

The Department of Justice and the FBI both declined to discuss their investigation with The Daily Beast, and a spokesperson for McAuliffe said the governor would cooperate.

 

Wang and his company have spent big to influence American politics—$1.4 million from 2012 to 2015 to lobby Congress and the State Department, according to CBS’s estimate. And Dandong Port Co., a subsidiary of Rilin Enterprises, has hired former politicos to lobby for its interests, as lobbying disclosure forms show.

It has also shelled out for nongovernmental efforts, including a grant to New York University in 2010 to create a center for U.S.-China Relations, as well as a grant to launch the Zbigniew Brzezinski Institute on Geostrategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in 2014.

Rilin Enterprises isn’t the first Chinese business to get mixed up in McAuliffe problems. McAuliffe and Tony Rodham, Hillary Clinton’s brother, courted Chinese investors for the troubled electric car company GreenTech Automotive. Politico called Rodham “a kind of traveling salesman” for the company.

During McAuliffe’s 2013 gubernatorial campaign, his work with the company became a liability—especially because of allegations that McAuliffe and Rodham used their political connections to unfairly expedite the visa process for their investors. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general issued a report in 2015 saying a top official there, Alejandro Mayorkas, made “an appearance of favoritism and special access.”

“Mayorkas intervened in an administrative appeal related to the denial of a regional center’s application to receive EB-5 funding to manufacture electric cars through investments in a company in which Terry McAuliffe was the board chairman,” the report says. “The intervention was unprecedented and, because of the political prominence of the individuals involved, as well as USCIS’s traditional deference to its administrative appeals process, staff perceived it as politically motivated.” More from the DailyBeast.

DHS: Border Patrol/Coast Guard Drone Conflict

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But in 2015, the Office of Inspector General says the CBP drone program has essentially been grounded.

The IG report, the second audit of the program since 2012, found there is no reliable method of measuring the program’s performance and determined that its impact in stemming illegal
immigration has been minimal.

According to the CBP Fiscal Year Report, the drones flew about 10 percent fewer hours in 2014 than the previous year and 20 percent fewer than in 2013. The missions were credited with contributing to the seizure of just under 1,000 pounds of cocaine in 2014, compared to 2,645 in 2013 and 3,900 in 2012. But apprehensions of illegal immigrants between 2014 and 2013 fell despite the flood of more than 60,000 unaccompanied children coming across the border from Central America.

Combined with the decrease in productivity, the OIG report disclosed the staggering costs to run the program, more than $12,000 per hour when figuring fuel, salaries for operators, equipment and overhead. More from FNC.

Related: Coast Guard UAV System

Related: CBP and Coast Guard even share buildings

   

Bungling border agency can’t find drone records

WashingtonTimes: Homeland Security can’t find a single record of a request to fly drones to help the Coast Guard, the agency said this week in a letter to a top member of Congress — an admission that’s likely to add fuel to the guard’s request for its own fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles.

R. Gil Kerlikowske, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said his agency’s Air and Marine office records all requests, but for some reason it “could not locate any prior requests from the USCG” for unmanned aerial surveillance flights.

For Rep. Duncan Hunter, California Republican and chairman of a subcommittee that oversees the Coast Guard, the admission was the latest signal that the border agency isn’t treating its colleagues in the guard fairly.

“It’s baffling, really. This response goes to show just how disadvantaged the Coast Guard truly is under the DHS umbrella,” said Joe Kasper, Mr. Hunter’s chief of staff. “It’s impossible to excuse the terrible record keeping, but that aside — we know for a fact that the Coast Guard has made numerous requests for UAS support.”

Both the Coast Guard and CBP are part of the Homeland Security Department, and under the current arrangement the guard has to use CBP’s drones. That leaves the maritime mission hostage to the whims of border officials, who have their own missions, and who already struggle with logistics and maintenance problems that keep their fleet of drones grounded far too often.

Mr. Hunter is pressing for the Coast Guard to get its own ground-based drones, which it can assign on its own.

“The Coast Guard shouldn’t have to rely on CBP and vice versa. We know CBP is well intentioned, and it has its own mission, but that doesn’t help the Coast Guard beyond the joint operational space,” Mr. Kasper said.

Neither CBP nor the Coast Guard had substantive replies to requests for comment Tuesday afternoon, but in his letter, dated Monday, Mr. Kerlikowske insisted the two agencies “work side-by-side.”

He said even if Coast Guard requests aren’t recorded, there are clear instances when CBP was assisting the guard’s operations. He pointed to a Guardian drone that aided the Coast Guard Cutter Boutwell in making three interdictions over the last year.

“CBO and USCG are close partners and have been highly successful performing joint operations in support of DHS’s primary mission to protect the American people from terrorist threats,” Mr. Kerlikowske said.

He said they will try to improve operations.

But his agency has been promising better drone use for years, and has consistently fallen short, according to watchdog reports.

Just 5 percent of Drone flights were conducted in the southeast, meaning off the coast of Florida, according to a new report Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office. The rest of the time the drones were operating on the border with Canada or the landlocked southwest border with Mexico.

Homeland Security Inspector General John Roth last year called CBP’s drone program “dubious achievers,” saying hundreds of millions of dollars have been wasted to stock a fleet that often can’t even get into the air.

He put the cost of flying each drone at more than $12,000 an hour — five times the figure CBP had given.

“Notwithstanding the significant investment, we see no evidence that the drones contribute to a more secure border, and there is no reason to invest additional taxpayer funds at this time,” Mr. Roth said in releasing his report last year. “Securing our borders is a crucial mission for CBP and DHS. CBP’s drone program has so far fallen far short of being an asset to that effort.”

So, the Reason is Angry over the Zika Funding is?

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NewYorkTimes: Mr. Obama chided lawmakers last week, saying they should not leave town at the end of this week unless they reconcile their differences over a Zika prevention funding bill and send him public health legislation he is willing to sign.

“They should not be going off on recess before this is done,” Mr. Obama said about putting resources behind an effort to stop the spread of the mosquito-borne virus. “To the extent that we’re not handling this thing on the front end, we’re going to have bigger problems on the back end.”

But chances of a quick compromise on the legislation seem dim. The House has provided only about half as much as the $1.1 billion approved by the Senate — both well short of the $1.9 billion sought by the White House. And the House bill would shift money to fight Zika from efforts to combat Ebola, which Mr. Obama compared to robbing Peter to pay Paul.

The president also archly referred to aggressive Republican efforts in fall 2014 to make the administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak a major campaign issue.

“Given that I have, at least, pretty vivid memories of how concerned people were about Ebola, the notion that we would stop monitoring as effectively and dealing with Ebola in order to deal with Zika doesn’t make a lot of sense,” he said.

Obama Raided $500M for Zika to Finance UN’s Green Climate Fund

Senator James Lankford 

James Lankford is a U.S. senator from Oklahoma.

DailySignal: Last week, the Senate passed legislation to address and prevent the spread of the Zika virus. However, the Senate failed to pay for it, and instead approved a $1.1 billion “emergency” spending supplemental bill that is not subject to the budgetary caps that were agreed to last year.

While congressional inattention to the budget crisis is inexcusable, it is even more disturbing that the Obama administration already has the authority to pay for a Zika response from existing agency budgets, but chose not to.

I’ve said several times on the Senate floor, over the last two weeks, that the Zika virus is a serious threat and should be dealt with responsibly by funding immediate vaccine research and aggressive mosquito population control.

The threat to adults from Zika is relatively small, but the threat to pre-born children is very high. Our national priority rightly focuses on protecting the life of these young children in the womb, since each child has value, no matter their age or size.

But an international medical emergency has now become a U.S. budget emergency, a major debt crisis that will impact our children as well.

If there was a way to both respond to Zika and prevent new debt spending, wouldn’t it be reasonable to do that? The Department of Health and Human Services, Department of State, and International Assistance Programs currently have about $80 billion in unobligated funds.

A small fraction of this could be reprogrammed and redirected to respond to the Zika emergency and not add any additional debt to our nation’s children. This is exactly the type of authority the Obama administration asked for in 2009 during the height of the H1N1 virus scare.

This is not a partisan idea, it is a reasonable one in light of the medical emergency and the financial reality of our nation.

In a floor speech last week, I also shed light on the fact that Congress last December provided the Obama administration with authority to pull money from bilateral economic assistance to foreign countries.

You might ask—so what did the administration spend the infectious disease money on earlier this year? You guessed it… climate change.

They can use those funds to combat infectious diseases, if the administration believed there is an infectious disease emergency. In the middle of the Zika epidemic, the administration did use their authority to pull money from foreign aid and spend it, but they didn’t use it for Zika.

You might ask—so what did the administration spend the infectious disease money on earlier this year?

You guessed it… climate change.

In March, President Obama gave the United Nations $500 million out of an account under bilateral economic assistance to fund the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund.

Congress refused to allocate funding for the U.N. Climate Change Fund last year, so the president used this account designated for international infectious diseases to pay for his priority.

While I understand that intelligent people can disagree on the human effects on the global climate, it is hard to imagine a reason why the administration would prioritize the U.N. Green Climate Fund over protecting the American people, especially pregnant women, from the Zika virus.

Unfortunately, it gets worse.

So, the administration found a way to offend our ally Israel, delay the Zika response and, if Congress allows him, add another billion dollars to our national debt.

The U.N. Green Climate Fund is connected to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an affiliated organization of the United Nations.

The UNFCCC recently accepted the “State of Palestine” as a signatory, which should trigger a U.S. funding prohibition. U.S. law forbids any taxpayer dollars to fund international organizations that recognize “Palestine” as a sovereign state.

So, the administration found a way to offend our ally Israel, delay the Zika response and, if Congress allows him, add another billion dollars to our national debt. That is a busy month.

The White House should not throw money at the U.N. while a vaccine for a virus known to cause severe, debilitating neurological birth defects is put on the back burner.

Zika is an important international crisis, but every crisis does not demand new “emergency funding” that is all debt. If there is a way to avoid more debt, we should take that option, it is what every family and every business does every day.

That Iran Propaganda Strategy Thing Began in 2011

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Amazing what details can be uncovered and how dates and people all seem to tell a much different story when facts are compiled.

A deeper look is required into Ploughshares and the deep relationship with the White House, as the world has been punked by some well placed organizations and some money…imagine that.

Related: White House Makes the Case for Iran Diplomacy (lots of details here)

Related: Ploughshares at the White House in 2011

Related: Where did Ploughshares get the Money? (Whoa on this one)

Related: Commitments, Verification and Next Steps (Ploughshares going to do the work?)

The Secret History of the Iran-Deal ‘Echo Chamber’

By

Bloomberg: A network of advocates, experts and messaging specialists the White House says helped it sell the Iran nuclear deal in 2015 actually began to campaign for such an accord four years earlier, before the real negotiations started.

Last week I was leaked e-mails and documents from an internal listserv operated by the arms control nonprofit Ploughshares Fund. That foundation has come under scrutiny after the New York Times Magazine quoted top White House foreign policy aide Ben Rhodes boasting how the foundation amplified the White House message in 2015 on the Iran deal. Rhodes told the magazine that supporters of the deal comprised an “echo chamber,” suggesting the independent experts were tools of a White House media campaign.

But the messaging work from Ploughshares on Iran began long before there was any Iran deal and long before Rhodes convened his regular meetings with progressive groups on shaping the Iran narrative.

Beginning in August 2011, Ploughshares and its grantees formed the Iran Strategy Group. Over time this group created a sophisticated campaign to reshape the national narrative on Iran. That campaign sought to portray skeptics of diplomacy as “pro-war,” and to play down the dangers of the Iranian nuclear program before formal negotiations started in 2013 only to emphasize those dangers after there was an agreement in 2015.

The strategy group, which included representatives of the Arms Control Association, the National Security Network, the National Iranian American Council, the Federation of American Scientists, the Atlantic Council and others, sought to “develop process and mechanism to implement Iran campaign strategies, tactics and narrative,” according to an agenda for the first meeting of the group on Aug. 17, 2011.

 Related: WHICH PATH TO PERSIA? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran

As a nonprofit, Ploughshares discloses annually the organizations that receive its grants. But until now, the way this network of nonprofits, advocacy organizations and policy experts coordinated its media campaign has been shrouded from the public.

The members of that network had two things in common. They all received substantial grants from Ploughshares and they all sought to prevent a war with Iran. But at the time, the progressives assessed the situation was bleak. An August 2, 2011 memo from Heather Hurlburt, then executive director of the National Security Network, and Peter Ferenbach, a co-founder of ReThink Media, shared with the group an assessment of the “media environment” on Iran and concluded it was “extremely difficult.”

The problem, according to Hurlburt and Ferenbach, was that in 2011 a succession of news stories on Iran, ranging from reports of progress on the country’s nuclear program to the Treasury Department’s designations that accused Iran of colluding with al Qaeda, had put progressives on defense. “We are left in the position of responding to the news headlines and parrying the negative commentary that follows,” they wrote.

Among the authors’ recommendations was that the Iran Strategy Group attack conservatives who advocated military strikes. “On a messaging note, it would be best to describe them as ‘pro-war,’ and leave it to them to back off that characterization of their position,” they wrote.

This approach became a centerpiece of the White House’s own message four years later when Obama was selling his deal to Congress. In a speech at American University that summer he said, “The choice we face is ultimately between diplomacy or some form of war.”

And yet while the Iran Strategy Group’s message about critics of the deal was echoed by the White House, the group’s initial messaging on Iran itself was much different between 2011 and 2013 than what Ploughshares and its grantees ending up saying in 2015. When the White House and its surrogates were campaigning for the deal in 2015, they emphasized how close Iran was to producing the fissile material needed for a nuclear weapon. Joe Cirincione, the president of Ploughshares, made this point in a piece for Slate after the deal was announced when he wrote, “without the deal, Iran could use its centrifuges to purify enough uranium for one or more bombs within weeks.”

 

This is not an accident. As I reported last year the White House declassified its estimate that Iran was three months away from producing enough fuel for a weapon in April 2015, after a framework for the Iran deal was agreed in Vienna, even though the intelligence community had assessed for more than two years that Iran was three months away from weapons-grade fuel.

Back in 2011, the Iran Strategy Group drafted a set of talking points called “Key Points on Iran and Nuclear Weapons.” Joel Rubin, the director of policy and government affairs for Ploughshares between 2011 and 2014, wrote in an e-mail to the strategy group, “We believe that this paper will help each of you to clearly enunciate, with confidence, a consensus view on how to argue for a sound U.S. policy towards Iran.”

The talking points — drafted by Paul Pillar, the intelligence analyst who was the lead author on the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate shared with Congress before the Iraq war — stressed that diplomacy was the best way to decrease the likelihood Iran went nuclear and that bombing Iran’s facilities would be counterproductive. But the talking points also included “An Iranian nuclear program is not imminent”; “An Iranian nuclear weapon is not inevitable”; and most controversial “If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, the United States and the West could live with it, without important compromise to U.S. interests.” Obama himself has contradicted that last line for years, arguing that he would be prepared to use military force to destroy Iran’s nuclear program if diplomacy did not work.

The Iran Strategy Group sought to play down Iran’s nuclear program as late as 2013. E-mails between strategy group members in August of that year in anticipation of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s report on Iran’s nuclear program that was released at the end of that month show that the network was already in campaign mode.  In an Aug. 20, 2013, e-mail to the Iran Strategy Group, Cirincione encouraged the Ploughshares grantees to “create a social media, web, expert push that carries our main points into the media and policy discussions in the first 12-24 hours.” He recommended that the points the group pushed in the media should include the argument that making enough highly enriched uranium for a single bomb “is just one step in a long weaponization process,” and that while Iran’s decision to start the Arak plutonium reactor was not good, it was “also just one step in a long alternative path to nuclear material for a weapon.”

The timing here is important. In September 2013, Iran and six other great powers including the U.S. announced the beginning of nuclear talks that ultimately produced the agreement in 2015.

Rubin, who is now president of the Washington Strategy Group, told me that the difference in talking points for the Ploughshares network between 2011 and 2013 and then in 2015 reflected the state of diplomacy with Iran and the real concern for progressives that Israel or the U.S. would bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. “The difference between 2011 and 2015 was that there was a different reality of what was taking place on the ground in terms of the negotiations and the process,” he said. “Ahmadinejad was the president in Iran, there was no negotiation process, and much of the chattering class was talking about when will Israel or the U.S. drop the bomb on Iran in 2011.”

When asked for comment on the story, Ploughshares communications director Jennifer Abrahamson said, “As a nonpartisan public foundation dedicated to reducing nuclear threats, Ploughshares Fund is proud to have supported a network of longstanding experts that helped stop Iran from building a bomb without starting another war in the Middle East.”

That pride is apparent. After a critical story from the AP last week on Ploughshares grants to National Public Radio, Cirincione went on the attack. In a column for Huffington Post suggesting the AP story was part of a campaign from opponents of the Iran deal to discredit him and his organization, he wrote, “Neoconservatives are furious that their efforts to trick the country into another unnecessary war in the Middle East failed.”

Don’t be surprised if you hear Ploughshares grantees repeating that. It sounds like a talking point.