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  • 2020-01-07 (xsd:date)
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  • Were Ex-Obama Officials 'Caught Advising Iran How to Defeat US Foreign Policy'? (en)
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  • In early 2020, we received multiple inquiries from readers about the accuracy of a report that claimed former officials from the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama had been caught advising Iran how to defeat U.S. foreign policy. The claims originated in a June 1, 2019, segment broadcast by the right-wing One America News Network (OANN) and was delivered by Jack Posobiec, a pro-Trump activist who has enthusiastically promoted a series of debunked conspiracy theories, including the Pizzagate and Seth Rich conspiracy theories. The segment can be viewed in full below. The following is an excerpted transcript of Posobiec's report, which carried the headline Obama Officials Caught Advising Iran How to Defeat U.S. Foreign Policy: The video was shared widely in the early days of January 2020 and re-promoted on Twitter by Posobiec himself, amid the escalation of tensions between the U.S. and Iran at that time, especially after the Jan. 2 assassination by the U.S. of Qassem Soleimani, major general of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard. We asked Posobiec to cite or provide sources and evidence in support of the claims in his report. In response, he sent us a link to a May 31, 2019, article published by the right-leaning website Breitbart, which bore the headline Report: Obama Administration Alumni Advising Iranian Regime on Dealing With Trump. That article was in turn based on an earlier report by The Daily Beast, with the headline Team Obama Tells Iran: Don’t Escalate, Don’t Take Trump’s Bait. That article reported that: The Daily Beast's article cited unnamed purported former Obama administration officials as saying they had held informal discussions with current Iranian government officials, encouraging them not to respond in kind to the Trump administration's escalation of tensions between the two countries, as follows: One former official who worked on the Obama administration’s Iran policy told The Daily Beast he spoke with Iranian government officials as recently as a few weeks ago, as tensions were cresting. His message, he said, was simple: The Trump administration can escalate things plenty all by itself; the Iranians shouldn’t take the bait, fuel the fire, and move things from bad to worse by, for example, pulling completely out of the nuclear deal. Neither The Daily Beast's nor Breitbart's articles contained the allegation (made by Posobiec) that those former Obama officials funneled to the Iranian government information they had acquired in congressional meetings. Furthermore, Posobiec's claim that the officials had been caught engaging in discussions appears misleading, because The Daily Beast reported that some of those officials themselves told the website about the talks, which they purportedly viewed as normal. Since the version of events presented by The Daily Beast was purportedly based on briefings given by unnamed individuals, we cannot verify its key claims by contacting those individuals directly. As such, its claims, and the claims contained in Breitbart's subsequent article and Posobiec's later OANN report, remain unproven. If we obtain on-the-record evidence that definitively corroborates or disproves those claims, we will update this fact check accordingly. (en)
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