Senator Tom Cotton would like a few words under oath with White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes.  The White House has claimed that Rhodes cannot be forced to testify due to “executive privilege.”  But there can be no privilege to conspire to deceive the American public, and Rhodes has already confessed to that as openly as possible.  Rhodes gave a lengthy and expansive interview to the New York Times Magazine in which he confessed to deceiving the American public about the timing and substance of the Iran deal.

In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. ‘We created an echo chamber,’ [Rhodes] admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. ‘They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.’ (emphasis added)

In the days since the interview went public, the depth of the deception has begun to become clear.  David Reaboi produced a devastating timeline showing exactly which authors had been the White House’s tools in portraying the Iran deal as a negotiation with “moderates,” when in fact it was nothing of the sort.  Fred Fleitz took obvious delight in pinning the ears back on a few of the journalists and think-tanks involved in parroting the White House’s false claims in the press.

Meanwhile, one of the think tanks — the Ploughshares Fund — proves to have been receiving Iranian money at the time it was helping the White House spread pro-Iran fictions to the press.  A Congressional investigation into the White House’s efforts to deceive the American public thus should be backed by a counterintelligence investigation.  The White House may not have been the only ones pulling the strings of these puppet journalists and organizations.

For example, there are questions about the alignment of the employer of another of the White House’s leading voices, Laura Rozen, with two of Iran’s top regional proxies.

For me, Samuels’ biggest bombshell was when he singled out arms control expert and Al-Monitor journalist Laura Rozen as being such a reliable shill for the administration’s line on the Iran talks that an NSC official told him: “Laura Rozen was my RSS feed. She would just find everything and retweet it.”

In a May 10 Weekly Standard article on the Rhodes profile, Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Lee Smith noted that Rozen’s employer, Al-Monitor, “is a news organization owned by a Syrian-American businessman who supports Bashar al-Assad” and “is the only U.S.-based media organization that has a pro-Hezbollah correspondent reporting from the Hezbollah front lines in Syria.”

In response to the Rhodes profile, the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington, DC arms control think tank that was very critical of the Bush administration’s Iran policy, posted a tweet on May 7 saying that it tried to warn Rozen, ACA (the Arms Control Association), and the Ploughshares Fund that Obama administration officials were overselling the nuclear deal to them and they should be more critical.

Ben Rhodes may not be as smart as he thinks he is.  It could be that the ease with which he manipulated members of the press and think tanks arises from the hard work of another government.  Congress’ interest in this scandal is entirely appropriate.  The truth has only begun to emerge.  Congress should pursue this case hotly to its final conclusion.