The New York Times‘ bombshell story on Ben Rhodes features outright admissions of a strategy of lies to sell the Iran deal via fake news sources.  It is important to step back and put the story in context.  This was the effect:

A deal proposing to give a self-declared American enemy access to both advanced enrichment technologies and also advanced ballisitic missiles should have been subject to the full debate and consent required by the Constitution’s Article II, Section 2.

Instead, the Senate elected not to debate the deal at all.  Far from advising, it filibustered.  Far from consenting, it used a procedural maneuver to avoid taking a vote.

In the days after the Senate refused to do its Constitutional duty, the President acted as if he had obtained the authority the Constitution required.  The result has been the rapid loss of the Levant to Russia and Iran, chaos in Iraq, the collapse of sanctions on Iran’s ballistic missile testing, and an increased refugee crisis pummeling Europe.

Look at what Rhodes did, at the President’s orders, through that lens.  We are talking about the collapse of American power.  We are talking about the President of the United States and his party successfully subverting the Congress’ performance of its constitutional duty.  We are talking about him doing so by undermining the institutions of journalism and public debate on which democracy depends.  The collapse abroad came as a result of actions designed to destroy public debate of his Iran deal.

How did it all work?  “Legions of arms-control experts began popping up” — all fake, of course — to support the President’s position.  Some of these groups were funded by Iranian money.  Rhodes names them himself:  “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else.”

When the Associated Press got wind of the Parchin side deal, by which Iran would be allowed to inspect itself — a complete joke that led to a whitewash of a report by the IAEA — these fake experts bullied the AP into silence.  Reuters joined in, but had to walk back its report critical of the AP’s work after it turned out that the truth was on the AP’s side.

A host of genuine experts, who were slandered and abused by Rhodes’ operation, are now fighting back.  Sohrab Ahmari is particularly furious about his treatment by a sitting US President while he was trying to do his duty as a real journalist.

In June 2013, the day after Rouhani was elected, I wrote a WSJ oped showing he’s no moderate…. I noted his “Death to America” statements, record in the Iranian security apparatus and role in suppressing the 1999 student uprising….  A few others (@EliLake, @SGhasseminejad, @mdubowitz) joined me in sounding skeptical notes but the [administration’s team] won the day.

Their message discipline was remarkable. It was as if they’d all received the same memo. Skeptics were shut out and ridiculed.  There were variations in tone. But on the main issues the Rouhani government, the US Iran lobby and most of the prestige press agreed.  The main line was that it’s either deal or war. Also that Washington and Tehran should overcome hard-liners on both sides. As if John McCain, Mark Kirk and Netanyahu, etc. were no better, morally, than the ayatollahs who stone women and hang gays.

[H]ow could so many foreign-policy elites pretend that history began in 09, following a dark prehistory that began in 03?  Well now we know: Ben Rhodes was feeding them the talking points, packaged in those obnoxious background that are Obama-admin hallmarks.

As the Weekly Standard points out, it’s not as if Rhodes was himself an expert on defense policy.  He was a creative writing major.  The Senate failed to do its duty.  The President actively betrayed his duty by arranging a message machine that lied to the American people and disrupted the legitimate public debate over his policy.  The journalists failed their duty by going along with it.  But the Defense Establishment is guilty too.  They also failed by not furiously objecting to an unqualified professional storyteller being admitted to the heights of the National Security Council.

Rhodes is full of contempt for the journalists he manipulated so easily.  “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” Rhodes said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Tom Nichols, a professor at the Naval War College, writes about how the whole purpose was to silence any debate:

I and other #IranDeal opponents, scholars and experts, were accused of ignorance and pure partisanship.  But we weren’t the ones cutting and pasting Rhodes’s talking points. We weren’t the ones accusing @AP of cooking the reports on #Parchin.   We were accused of bad faith. But as Rhodes admits, he spun the messaging *intentionally* to short circuit a debate.

Here’s Rhodes: “We set up an echo chamber.”   He’s not even trying to finesse it. He fed a line to reporters and think tank flacks.  And the rest of us had to take static for being partisan from people like @cirincione, and journo giants like @Max_Fisher on #Iran…

Those who saw the deal as an Obama play for a legacy based on some vaporous #Iran grand bargain got it right, like @Doranimated.  Those of us who objected to #IranDeal on those grounds were then told that this was just striking while the iron was hot, only on nukes. This, by Rhodes’s own admission, is now completely a lie. This was part of a harebrained Big Policy Idea going back years.

How can we trust any of these political or journalistic organs to repair the damage they helped to cause?  Where even to begin fixing the damage?  How can we bring justice to those who subverted the American constitutional system when they control all the levers of power?