Secure Freedom Radio Sit Down With Ken Timmerman

Ken Timmerman is a nationally recognized investigative reporter and war correspondent who was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for the work he has done to expose Iran’s nuclear weapons program. His latest book, Dark Forces: the Truth About What Happened in Benghazi, probes the secrets of U.S. covert action in Libya as well as Iran’s involvement in the Benghazi attacks.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Welcome to Secure Freedom Radio, this is Frank Gaffney, your host and guide for what I think of as an intelligence briefing on the war for the free world. I have learned over the years to respect greatly and appreciate tremendously the intelligence as well as what shortfalls we have in intelligence, for that matter, or the lack of its application to the challenges of our time by our friend and colleague Kenneth Timmerman. Ken is a prize winning, investigative reporter, having done yeoman work on a whole host of issues, mostly in the national security space over many years. The author of numerous books, including most recently Deception: The Making of the YouTube Video Hillary and Obama Blamed for Benghazi. We’re going to talk with him about that and much more, but we’re going to start by welcoming back to the program for a full hour of deep drill down, Ken Timmerman. Thanks so much for joining us, Ken.

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Yeah, Frank, thanks for having me on. It’s a pleasure.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

I want to start with sort of a breaking news story, Ken. The Department of Homeland Security is of course these days run by a fellow by the name of Jeh Johnson, who has come to some controversy in recent days because of his rather aggressive outreach, as it’s called, to the Muslim-American community, specifically his travels to Chicago over the Labour Day weekend to keynote a convention there of one of the, well, most notorious, I think it’s fair to say, of Muslim organizations, indeed a Muslim Brotherhood front organization called the Islamic Society of North America. Give us your take, both the specifics of this incident, to the extent you have insights into them, and more broadly, what it really says not just about Jeh Johnson, but kind of the willful blindness of a government when it deals with the Brotherhood in this fashion.

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Well, I think it’s much worse than willful blindness, Frank. And I got to tell you, I was flabbergasted when I heard that he was going to speak with ISNA. ISNA, as you mentioned, is a very well-known Muslim Brotherhood – not even front organization, a Muslim Brotherhood organization. It is, you know, it is part of the Muslim Brotherhood. You know, they operate in tandem with the Muslim Brotherhood and support its agenda. And, you know, you have a move in congress to outlaw ties with the Muslim Brotherhood because it is a terrorist organization. Several of our friends and allies in the Middle East have already outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, so for the secretary of Homeland Security to be a keynote speaker and thus legitimate them here in the United States is just astonishing, it’s stunning, and I think it shows – to my mind, at least – the complete wrongheadedness and dangerousness of the Obama policy towards the Muslim Brotherhood in general and we’ve seen it from the beginning of his presidency.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yeah. Well, I think in fairness, we saw some evidence of it in the previous administration, too. But it’s definitely been ramped up. And Ken, I think what you’ve just said about ISNA is so important for people to understand because it’s not just a rather large organization with very strong association with the Muslim Brotherhood back in Egypt, but it organizes and fosters Islamic societies all over the United States. And as you know from your close scrutiny of various terrorist operations, there is some direct connection in at least a number of the instances of terrorism in this country between Islamic societies, mosques if you will, and some of the perpetrators of these attacks. So when you hear people say, Ken, oh, well, no, it’s fine to do business with the Muslim Brotherhood or its various fronts, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Students Association, the Islamic Society of North America – all of which, by the way, Jeh Johnson has been involved with, what is your response to that, that we really shouldn’t worry because these are just peaceable Muslims, the good guys, the people who we can work with against al-Qaeda and so on?

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Well, what we’ve seen, Frank, and I think it’s a very long track record, is that the Muslim Brotherhood at times is a peaceful organization, at times it engages in the political process, at times it is a militant organization, and at times it is a terrorist organization. And it just matters – the only difference is timing and tactics. You have never seen any of these groups that you’ve just cited abandon the notion of a worldwide Islamic caliphate. You’ve never seen any of these groups here in America abandon the idea that shariah law is the ultimate authority here on earth. And that it is incompatible with the United States constitution and with our freedoms. And the other thing you’ve not seen – and this is immediately important, you’ve not seen any of these organizations urge their members, urge their followers, to cooperate with law enforcement to out the bad guys in their midst. You have never had any cooperation from a single imam that I’m aware of in this country with the FBI or others. On the contrary, you’ve had imams proclaiming – and some of these organizations proclaiming publicly not to cooperate with the FBI in terrorist investigations.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

This is one of the things that is infuriating, the Obama administration has essentially embraced, as you’ve indicated, not only these groups, but kind of their narrative, that there’s nothing wrong with their Islamic supremacism. The only problem is violent extremism, they say. And since the Brotherhood professes not to be a violent extremist organization, though you’re right, it obviously has a considerable track record, notably with Hamas in all of that, they can be not only dealt with, but they can be an arbiter of what we should know and say and do about this threat posed to us by their jihadist pals. And this is kind of mind-boggling and I think most Americans listening to this conversation or listening to the president of the United States say things like, oh, I don’t know, the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam, are simply agog.

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Yeah, right. And I found when I was researching one of my earlier books, Dark Forces: The Truth about What Happened in Benghazi, that the White House actually hired a theorist to make sense of all of this. His name is Quentin Victorowitz [PH] He’s a former CIA analyst. He was sent to Great Britain in – just in time, I think it was 2007, when the Brits were getting ready to abandon their outreach to, quote, moderate Muslim imams because it wasn’t working. And he came back and he said, oh, we have to reach out to moderate Muslim imams and – to prevent violent extremism, because they will tame the wild youth. In fact, what happens is that they just indoctrinate them. They indoctrinate them into shariah supremacism. And at a time and place of their choosing, they turn to violence. That’s why I say timing and tactics is really the only difference between a violent Muslim organization and one of these other groups.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

One of the things that I guess is implicit in that, but just, again, pull it out, when you say that, it’s not that they prefer one tactic over the other, it’s situational, isn’t it? I mean, their preference is, as Muhammad taught – and he being the perfect Muslim, you know, his is the example to be emulated, that, you know, use violence because it’s the most effective way to do it. Unless your circumstances are such that you can’t successfully do it, is that right?

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Right. For example, you have the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, this is the – and the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, which was headed by Huma Abedin’s father and where her mother plays a big role and Huma herself, Huma Abedin, remember, the adviser, the co-chair, now, of the Hillary Clinton for president campaign. She was also an assistant editor at this magazine. The notion of minority –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

It’s the family business, Ken.

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Yes, it is the family business. And the whole notion of minority affairs is just that. When Muslims are in countries such as Great Britain or the United States or elsewhere where they are in the minority, then they should play politics, then they should engage in non-violent outreach and expansion as much as they can. But when they are in the majority and when they control the armies, then absolutely they should use violence. Turn to the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran where it says their goal is jihad, okay? And their army –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

You are one of the country’s leading experts on Iran and we’re going to talk about that in a moment, but I will ask you when we come back just to drill down a little bit further on this Huma Abedin story cause I think this is really important for all of us to calibrate properly and we’ll do that with Ken Timmerman, investigative reporter par excellence, and the author, most recently, of Deception: The Making of the YouTube Video Hillary and Obama Blamed for Benghazi. That and more straight ahead.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

We’re back. We’re talking for this full hour with a great resource on matters involving national security in general and specifically about a part of the world in which he has spent an enormous amount of time both in situ, as they say, and as a student of it, an observer, an analyst, namely, the Middle East. He is Kenneth Timmerman. Among his many extraordinary attributes, is he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for work that he has done to try to counter Iran’s nuclear weapons program. He was also, in 2012, the Republican nominee for congress from Maryland’s eighth district. Ken is a reporter and author, extraordinary, as I say, friend and colleague and always glad to have him with us. And Ken, we were talking before the break a bit about Huma Abedin. And maybe you could just say a word or two about who she is and then we’ll talk about what she may be up to.

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Well, Huma Abedin got her start in political life as an intern in the Bill Clinton White House. Apparently, she was the only one that he didn’t accost because she quickly became Hillary Clinton’s confident and her gal Friday. She rose up the ranks, went with Mrs. Clinton to the State Department where she was basically in charge of her Blackberry and her schedule. And now is the co-chair of the Clinton campaign. So she is Hillary Clinton’s alter-ego, if you wish. And she comes – I call her a Muslim Brotherhood princess. She comes from a family of royalty of the Muslim Brotherhood, if you will tolerate that image for a second. You know, her father was the head of this institution, the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs. Her mother was the editor of the magazine. Her brother was involved in it. And she herself was involved.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yeah, and her sister, too, I believe as well. And her mother, of course, has been running it ever since her father died back in the, I think, late 1990s. Ken Timmerman is our guest, we’re discussing among other things the civilization jihad of the Muslim Brotherhood as it calls it, it’s sort of stealthy, not so much non-violent as pre-violent efforts to take down countries in the West like the United States. And Ken, you were just setting up a really chilling thought and that is that a woman who has deep personal as well as familial ties to the Brotherhood has been sitting at the right hand and clearly very, very important in the world of Hillary Clinton, a prospective commander-in-chief. Given what you know of Hillary Clinton’s record – and she’s big on, you know, alluding to her record although it didn’t sound so good last night, I have to say [LAUGHS] in Matt Lauer’s conversation with her, but she’s big on talking about her record, you have done a superb job among other things of drilling down into her record with respect to Libya. And I’d ask you to sort of give us a little bit of a flavor of that record and then, to the extent you can, what role do you think Huma Abedin played in Hillary Clinton’s conduct both in the sort of macro picture of Libya and specifically the Benghazi affair?

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Well, let me just hit that second question first and tell you, we don’t know. Up until now, we really do not know. We know that she was a gatekeeper, we know that she was waking her up when she fell asleep in the middle of the morning for whatever reasons so she could get briefed. But we do not know what Huma Abedin actually – what kind of policy impact she actually had on Mrs. Clinton. We can say this, though, without any doubt whatsoever, Hillary Clinton embraced the pro-Muslim Brotherhood policies that you would think that Huma Abedin would be portraying. And, as with Obama, she has promoted the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya, in Tunisia, in Egypt with the overthrow of Mubarak, and Syria at the beginning of the Syrian civil war. So her policies, Frank, have been, Mrs. Clinton’s policies, have been pro-Muslim Brotherhood from the get-go. And I believe she’s ideologically wedded to it.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yeah, well, I – unfortunately, it sounds so. There certainly was a little riff at the end of her appearance with Matt Lauer last night on NBC in which she went off on a tear about, you know, how you need to treat Muslims and so on and this isn’t, of course, about how you treat Muslims, this is how you treat jihadists, this is how you treat people who embrace a totalitarian ideology that is all about, as you said earlier, Ken Timmerman, destroying this country. And if they can do it, you know, through subversion from within, so be it. If not, they certainly prefer to use violence. And Huma’s role, I mean, just a word on that, Ken, I recall – I don’t have the exact words in front of me, but I recall the Washington Post ran one of any number of fatuous profiles on Huma Abedin back in, I think, the time Hillary was running for president the first go-around, back in 2008, and she – it said something to the effect of when it comes to matters of the Middle East, Huma’s views are always sought and they never have a meeting, Hillary and her entourage, without Huma being there if that’s – if that’s the topic. So again, Ken, we may not know specifically, though there seems to be more and more evidence of what’s going on with these emails as they trickle out that she was in fact involved in all of this. But just knowing what you do about the policies and specifically the decision not to provide security that was requested in Benghazi and then this effort to lay off onto a video the blame for it when things predictably went south, talk a bit about that and maybe a role that a Huma Abedin figure might play in it.

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Right, well, first of all, we know that Huma Abedin never left Hillary Clinton’s side. So you mentioned her being part of meetings on the Middle East, she was part of meetings on everything. I don’t think there was a meeting that Mrs. Clinton had as secretary of state when Huma was not present in the room. Now, one of the things that’s come out of the emails, and I talk about that in my new book, Deception: The Making of the YouTube Video that Hillary and Obama Blamed for Benghazi, is the absolutely obsession of Mrs. Clinton, of key aides, including Huma Abedin, but others as well, with this idea of Islamic shariah blasphemy laws. And in fact, Mrs. Clinton, as secretary of state, worked very closely with the Saudis, the Turks, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, to get the United Nations to pass resolution 1618, which essentially called on Western nations to ban speech about Islam that Muslims didn’t like. And there was really no qualification, there was no, you know – it was as open as that. If we don’t like it, it must be hate speech. And Mrs. Clinton said, well, you know, we don’t have these kinds of laws in the United States, but we do have hate speech laws that we can apply. And ultimately, I think, that is what they were testing when they jailed the maker of Innocence of Muslims, the YouTube video that they knowingly, wrongly blamed for the Benghazi attacks. I show in my book, Frank, that the night of the attacks, the YouTube channel that they were saying that everybody was watching had four hundred and five hits. And it wasn’t until they had a State Department and CIA contractor put up a special YouTube – put this film on a special YouTube channel, using some very sophisticated marketing techniques, that it shot through the roof, it went viral. I’ve got a chart in my new book that shows this, you know, a hundred thousand on the first day, three hundred thousand the second day, two million by the third day, and ten million by the end of the week. And once they got at that mark, they took down that special YouTube channel and erased it. Just as Mrs. Clinton did with her emails. I don’t know if they used BleachBit, but they erased it –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

They may well have. They certainly found it to be successful in destroying evidence. Ken, we have to pause her for a moment, but when we come back, I want to ask you about the timeline here. When was that sort of operation, that information operation, run as it related to the purported influence and impact of this video. And also to talk a little bit more about the shariah blasphemy business. Cause this is – this is an incredibly important insight into what’s been going on for some time under Hillary and Obama as well. That and much, much more with Ken Timmerman in this special hour long edition of Secure Freedom Radio right after this.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Welcome back. Ken Timmerman is our guest. He is the author of numerous books, including Shadow Warriors: Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender, a fiction work by the name of St. Peter’s Bones, a personal favourite of mine, but most recently the new book, Deception: The Making of the YouTube Video Hillary and Obama Blamed for Benghazi. And Ken, we’ve been talking a bit about this Benghazi episode and what flowed from it. I do want you to sort of make clear exactly when this effort to drive eyeballs, presumably many of them in parts of the world where we’d just as soon not have those eyeballs driven, but how that related in terms of the timing to the purported impact of that YouTube video on this so-called demonstration in Benghazi.

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Well, they decided – when I say they, Hillary Clinton and the White House decided to blame the YouTube video in a two-hour video teleconference that took place on the night of the attacks between 7:30pm and 9:30pm. They came out of that meeting with ten action items, five of them related to the military assets that the Pentagon had been spinning up and they related to how they were going to spin them down or slow them down. And the other five action items out of this two-hour secure video teleconference at the White House were – involved the YouTube video. And how they were going to blame the YouTube video that nobody had seen for the attacks in Benghazi. Now, Frank, one of the things that I found in doing research on my new book was that Sid Blumenthal played an instrumental role in this information operation to deceive the American public and to deflect attention away from what was really going on in Benghazi, which was the US effort, through our allies, to ship arms to terrorists in Syria. That was what was really happening in Benghazi. And that’s what they didn’t want us to focus on.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Haven’t focused on much since, as a matter of fact. But Ken, just before we leave that point – and that’s really, really important because, of course, Sid Blumenthal features prominently in a lot of these email escapades and the improper use or handling, at least, of classified information. In fact, somebody told me just yesterday, I think, that he was apparently reading compartmented information for which I’m reasonably sure he was never cleared. So I mean, there’s all kinds of elements to this that raise this question about judgment and the proper conduct of an official, but Ken, with respect to the video point, you’re saying that before the Benghazi attack scarcely anybody had seen this thing. After the Benghazi attack, when they decided – and by the way, of course, one of the individuals in this gambit, in addition to Sid Blumenthal and presumably Huma Abedin and, of course, Hillary Clinton, was old Ben Rhodes. Who we have, as you know, in emails saying this has nothing to do with policy, folks. Don’t think about that. This has all to do with the video. And they were sending Huma personally and Rashad Hussain, the president’s so-called envoy to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation off to try to impress the OIC with what a great job they were doing demonstrating their commitment to, well, enforcing shariah blasphemy. But Ken, just to make it very clear, after all of that, they go about with a CIA contractor using sophisticated techniques to massively increase the number of people around the world who had seen this stupid video, is that what you’re saying?

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Absolutely right. A monumental balagan, you know, as they would say in Israel. I mean, a real – a real screw-up. And but it was policy. That was their policy.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Screw-up or subterfuge –

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Wrongheadedness. Wrongheadedness.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

— subterfuge. No, no, no. But isn’t what you’re saying, that it’s – it was a deliberate information operation to mislead the American people and keep them from looking at the policy failure of, among other things, arming al-Qaeda?

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Absolutely right. Absolutely right. So Sid Blumenthal played an instrumental role in this.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Scandalous.

KEN TIMMERMAN:

We have one memo that he sent to Hillary Clinton shortly after midnight. So it’s after she’s made her first statement blaming the YouTube video that, of course, nobody had seen. And Sid says, oh, you know, this is great. The YouTube video is really the thing. President Magariaf of Libya was meeting with his top security advisers this afternoon, meaning before the attacks occurred in Benghazi, to discuss the YouTube video. Absolutely fabricated, false, and yet, you know, he was putting this out there. And then he went on to say, well, we’re going to get this story out. My son Max has got a big piece that will be out first thing in the morning. And obviously Sid had already fed his son, Max, false information which then was put out there, identifying the filmmaker, saying where he was. It led to him essentially going into hiding. Saying he was an Israeli Jew with five hundred Jewish donors here in the United States. So his secondary goal was to, really, I think provoke anti-Semitic attacks here in the United States. And to blame Israel for everything, because that’s what the Muslim Brotherhood tends to like to do. And all of this was part of their deception operation. I think we’re going to see more emails, by the way, from Sid Blumenthal, if they made it through the BleachBit shredder. Because I am sure there is much more behind this.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

I’m sure of it as well. And, you know, Ken, the other piece of that is that Hillary herself, as you know, in an email to her daughter, Chelsea, during the attack told her this had nothing to do with a video, as I recall. Is that correct?

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Correct. Absolutely right. Absolutely right. She also had a conversation that night with Magariaf. So she told the truth to her daughter, she told the truth to the president of Libya, she told the truth the next day to the prime minister of Egypt where they specifically discussed the video and she said, oh, no, no, no, the video had nothing to do with the attack. She said that. So she tells the truth to these people, but she lies to the American people. Absolutely disgraceful.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yeah. Unfortunately, this is a pattern that we’re becoming pretty familiar with and the question is, will it be considered by the American people unacceptable? Or will they decide that that’s fine in a commander-in-chief and heaven help us if we get more of it in that office. Let me just go back to one other thing that we talked about here just to close this out, one other piece, you mentioned that Hillary Clinton, in the course of her time as secretary of state had sort of slavishly promoted one of the Muslim Brotherhood and Organization of Islamic Cooperation agendas, namely, suppressing our First Amendment freedoms of speech by characterizing some of this that gave offense to Muslims as hate speech. But there was also a very famous quote that she gave in Istanbul at the beginning of the so-called Istanbul Process, do you remember the term that she used in that context?

KEN TIMMERMAN:

I don’t – yeah, I don’t have it on the tip of my – I write about that in a book and, yeah, she was there, right in the beginning of that Istanbul Process.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Well, here’s what she said, we can use, quote, old-fashioned techniques of shaming and peer pressure to, you know, suppress that which we abhor or something to that effect, unquote. And I just remember at the time being so struck by the fact that a secretary of state of the United States would commit herself to this practice. And we certainly saw it very much in evidence in this Benghazi caper. Ken, let me just ask you quickly in closing on this, looking back at Hillary’s record, specifically with respect to the Middle East, and Libya and Benghazi and so on, is it fair to say that this is a record that would more likely disqualify somebody for high office rather than be a basis for giving it to them?

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Oh, absolutely, Frank. She betrayed the sacred trust that our commanders, our civilian commanders, have for the people that they ask to get into harm’s way to defend our freedom. She betrayed that. She did not have their back. Let me just say one final thing, though, about this shaming and peer pressure. Don’t think that’s just something that you might do in neighbourhood tea parties or, you know, when you’re baking cookies or something like that, it can also take the form of an executive order or of a statement from, let’s say, the attorney general about transgendered bathrooms. Right, that is shaming and peer pressure. So it can also be tied in with money, it can be tied in with lawsuits by the federal government, you could lose if you were a state, you could lose your federal funding if you do not do the things that they want you to do by shaming and peer pressure.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

It’s peer pressure of a kind, that’s for sure. Ken Timmerman is our guest, we have another two blocks with him, I’m very pleased to say. We’ll talk a bit about Iran in the next one. Stay tuned for that and more, straight ahead.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Welcome back. Our guest is Ken Timmerman. He has, among other things to his credit, been the president and CEO of an organisation called the Foundation for Democracy in Iran and in connection with its work, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. For seven years he was also, by the way, the lead investigator for families of 9-11 victims who were suing the Islamic Republic of Iran on the basis in part of evidence that he developed that Iran was up to its eyeballs in that murderous attack, that act of jihad against the United States. Ken, you’ve been in the business of following the money with respect to these Iranians and what they’ve done with the money to engage in acts of jihad against this country, not just elsewhere, but as I say, here on 9-11 and elsewhere in this country. When you hear that the government of the United States turned over not just four hundred million dollars, but 1.7 billion dollars in, I don’t know, maybe unmarked bills –

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Cash –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

— but certainly foreign currency on unmarked planes delivering it to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, what did you make of that?

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Well, I mean, you know, you pull this – if I had written that in a novel, nobody would have believed me, Frank.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

That’s right. Totally implausible.

KEN TIMMERMAN:

I mean, And not only did they – not only did they deliver it in cash, they used, for the most part, these five hundred euro notes that the European Central Bank is going to take out of circulation because they are the currency most often used by money launderers, drug dealers, and terrorists.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Well, there surely won’t be any of those sorts getting their hands on the windfall cash that the administration gave [LAUGHTER] And do you think that’s fair to say, Ken, somebody quibbled with me the other day when I made that point that these planes were delivering this – pallets of cash to the Iran Air operations. But is it not correct that that’s essentially an arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the terror central for the regime?

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Well, that’s right, Iran Air, Mahan Air, especially Mahan Air, has been designated by the United States because their planes are chartered by the IRGC to ferry soldiers and weapons into Syria, in particular. So yeah, look, the entire Iranian government – this is one of those things that we found out when we were investigating Iran’s ties to the 9-11 attack, for which, by the way, the plaintiffs, the victims won a six billion dollar judgment in a New York court, okay, which is in the process of being enforced, we hope, but one of the things we learned, Frank, is that –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Except the money’s been given away, hasn’t it? Isn’t that kind of the problem?

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Well, the money is being given away by the administration and – but, you know, there are other things going on. There’s still a lot of enforcement actions going on globally as well as in the United States. But let me just make this point, it’s very important that people in this country find it so hard to understand we are a government and a nation that obeys a rule of law, at least until this president came along, but we have a – there’s a separation of power and you know that the executive branch, at least legally and constitutionally, is not supposed to spend money without authorisation by congress – okay, they just paid ransom to Iran, but there’s supposed to be these limits on executive power. In Iran, that is not the case. Every single instrument, instrumentality of the government or of state power is used and co-opted by their terrorist organisations and their terrorist operations. So if they need to ferry weapons or explosives, let’s say weapons to Syria, they use Iran Air or Mahan Air. If they need to send explosives to Buenos Aires to blow a Jewish community centre, as they did in 1994, they might use a ship from the Iranian – Islamic Revolution of Iran’s shipping lines. IRISL. Which is why it also has been designated. If they need to have money wired to a terrorist on the lam in Europe after killing an Iranian dissident, as was the case with Shapu Bhaktiar [PH] in 1991, well, they might use a front company controlled by the telecommunications ministry. Right? It’s the entire government –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

It’s a terrorist enterprise stemmed to stir and engage in jihad. Hey Ken, let me just ask you about one thing, because you sort of set that very important riff up by talking about, you know, how things are supposed to work in this country, our mutual friend, Claudia Rosett has, of course, done some very important investigative reporting as well on specifically this issue of the so-called – I think it’s the judgment fund, is that the term for it in the Justice Department?

KEN TIMMERMAN:

I think that’s right, yes.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

That was the source for this immense amount of cash that was given to the Iranians. I’ve never heard of such a thing before. It sounds as though it’s basically a slush fund that the president had the authority to use for whatever purpose he wanted. And it just – it suggests, as you say, that our own country has now essentially given the whole idea of the rule of law a miss.

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Well, Frank, I hate to say it, but I think under Obama, we have taken great strides towards becoming a banana republic. Where, as you say, the chief executive can have a slush fund at his disposal for whatever purpose he chooses. Claudia’s reporting was phenomenal on this and what she found out was to make this 1.3 billion dollar payment – so it was four hundred million first, then 1.3 billion, to make the additional 1.3 billion dollar payment, they had to withdraw from the treasury thirteen amounts just under, by one cent, one hundred million dollars. So it would be ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, so it would not trigger a one hundred million dollar reporting requirement. Again, this is just a – it’s a subterfuge, it’s a clear violation of the intent of the law if not the actual letter of the law. And I think, there was a hearing this week in congress about it. I wasn’t able to be there to get the results, but I know that there are certainly several congressional committees looking into the legality of this.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Hey Ken, Hillary Clinton, of course, last night in the conversation with Matt Lauer was bobbing and weaving rather frantically about her support for the Iran nuclear deal and in the end, I guess it came down to this, she thought that, well, that’s going to put a lid on the Iranian nuclear ambitions and that will allow us to turn to all of the other things that are wrong with the Iranian regime with more clarity and focus and effort. First of all, let’s talk about the extent to which this deal actually is putting a lid on the Iranian nuclear weapons program.

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Well, look, I have been lecturing up until recently at the joint counter-intelligence training academy in Quantico. And I was asked to kind of describe how the Iranian regime have viewed these negotiations. And so I put up several slides showing how Khamenei, the supreme leader, stalled. He held out because he knew the longer he held out and the more he stalled, the more concessions he would get from John Kerry and from president Obama, who desperately wanted a deal at any price. So we gave up all the sanctions. We gave up sanctions on their – hard sanctions on their ballistic missile efforts. We allowed them to continue developing advanced centrifuges, and I mean fifth generation centrifuges, not second or third but fifth generation centrifuges. Which, when the sanctions come off in ten years from now, will allow them to build a weapons worth of highly enriched uranium in about two to three weeks. Right? Two to three weeks from the first bomb. Not two to three months, not a year, two to three weeks. All right? They are allowed to continue producing heavy water. Oh, and we’re going to buy some of that heavy water as well. So we’re going to subsidize their nuclear weapons development program. I mean, Frank, it’s pathetic. Not only does this nuclear deal not put a crimp on their style or put any real restrictions on their nuclear weapons development, it guarantees that they will be a full-fledged nuclear weapons capable power in ten years from now with advanced technology –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

And that’s the best case, that’s the best case.

KEN TIMMERMAN:

— with advanced technology.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Hey Ken, we have to pause, we’ll be right back with more with Ken Timmerman on the Iran deal and so much more, straight ahead.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

We’re back for the final installment of our hour-long special conversation with Kenneth Timmerman, investigative reporter of the first order. Author many times over. A former congressional candidate, Nobel Peace Prize nominee and so much more. And Ken, we were talking before the break a bit about the nuclear deal. It is a travesty, I think, no question about it, a fraud. I call it the Obama bomb fraud as does my colleague, Fred Fleitz. Let’s go back to this argument of Hillary’s that that deal allows us to focus on all of the other problems with Iran. Would you just quickly sort of give us an assessment of what those problems are and how serious they remain, especially now that we’ve enriched Iran beyond imagination?

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Right, well, first, just the chutzpah of her saying that, we’re going to focus on their other problems and we give them 1.7 billion dollars in cash that they can use for terrorist operations immediately? I mean, how is that focusing on their other problems? Iran is the – obviously, the biggest and the most powerful, the most aggressive state sponsor of terrorism in the history of the world. Okay? In using the state for aggressive terrorist operations overseas, killing their own dissidents, blowing up Jews in Buenos Aires, funding groups like Hamas and everything else. That is not going to stop. They’ve been emboldened in their export of terrorist regimes. Iran is also subverting its neighbors. We have essentially abandoned the space in Iraq to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. The new overseer, if you wish, or proconsul of Iraq, is named Qasem Soleimani. He’s the commander of the Quds force. And this is something that never should have been allowed to take place. At the time that we were victorious in the surge, the Iranians were on the run. We had captured – this was 2008, before Obama came into power, we had captured many of their revolutionary guards Quds force operatives. And they were terrified that these people were going to speak and spill the beans on their operations. Well today, forget it. Iran basically owns Iraq. They are subverting whatever residual effort that we have in Afghanistan to help the Afghan government, they’re supporting the Taliban, they’re providing IEDs and everything else. So I really don’t see any indication, first of all, that this administration has focused on Iran’s bad behavior in other spheres. Nor do I see any indication from Mrs. Clinton that she even comprehends what the Iranians are up to.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Ken, a lot of that is obviously very bad and particularly troubling for our interests and friends in that neighborhood. Some of them are better friends than others, to be sure, but nonetheless, it isn’t going to be good for our interests writ large if Iran, emboldened as you say and empowered, is turned loose on the neighborhood in a way that is even greater than what they’ve done to date. But let’s bring this home to Americans. Talk a little bit if you would about the acts of terrorism against Americans, our personnel in uniform and others, the threats to our naval forces in the Persian Gulf, notably, and their activities in our own hemisphere that give rise to all kinds of problems south of our border and across it as well.

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Yeah, people tend to forget that Iran has been in a close alliance with both Cuba and Venezuela. The Iranians – the flight between Caracas and Tehran is a – you know, always empty. It’s a direct flight and yet it is always booked. In other words, you can’t get a seat, but there are no passengers on the plane, it’s an Iran Air flight. Because it’s full of weapons. And they have been building ballistic missiles in Venezuela. Venezuela has become an outpost of the Islamic Republic of Iran. People look at Iran’s ballistic missiles and say, oh, you know, they don’t have the range to reach the United States. Well, gee, what if they’re launched from Venezuela? Then they certainly have the range to reach the United States. And they can reach us with much larger missiles that can carry a much larger warhead. So that’s one very immediate near threat –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Well, let me ask you about, before we move on, just – we’ve been hearing about missile base on the northern coast of Venezuela for a number of years. I have yet to have anybody tell me that it’s actually a building or what its state of progress is. Do you know, Ken Timmerman?

KEN TIMMERMAN:

I do not. And I’ve heard those same – the same stories that you’ve heard. But we know there’s an awful lot of smoke, we know that for sure. And again, we see this constant traffic between Venezuela and Iran of intelligence operatives, of money, we see Iranian investments, we see Iran using Venezuelan banks for money laundering, that’s been going on for quite some time as well. But we don’t have a great deal of visibility into what’s actually happening. My guess, Frank, is that our intelligence community has not either committed the human assets or does not have the human assets to be able to determine what’s really going on in Venezuela.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Okay. Well, let’s continue with this litany of horribles, Ken Timmerman. Beyond the murderous attacks on things like the Khobar Towers and of course our embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut years ago, what else have the Iranians been doing that has put, clearly, our forces in the crosshairs in the Persian Gulf?

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Well, you mentioned the naval – the swarming attacks against US naval ships. We mentioned IEDs earlier on. How about this, Frank, how about if you are a dual national, an American of Iranian origin, let’s say you’ve given up your Iranian passport and you back to Iran, as thirty thousand Iranian-Americans do every year, by the way, now that Obama has essentially told the Islamic state of Iran the price per hostage we are willing to pay, which is a hundred million dollars, you go back to Iran today and you become a potential hostage. I mean, it’s very clear, yeah.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Well, and I think, actually, there’s been a State Department warning to that effect, if I’m not mistaken, that – telling people, be careful, you may not even want to go there. There have also been missiles launched at aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf as I recall – or not at them, exactly, but in close proximity to them. So there’s obviously levels of increasing aggressiveness towards our forces there, that can only, again, be encouraged by this kind of behavior by our administration, Ken. But finish up here, if you would, in the last minute or two we have, what are they doing in our own hemisphere? You’ve mentioned Venezuela, you’ve mentioned missiles there, but how about drug trafficking and cross border kinds of operations, notably one that was plotting to do some damage in Washington, DC?

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Right, that’s right. And I remember at the time, you know, writing if only they had picked the right Mexican for that particular attack, they would have carried it out. But they happened to pick a Mexican drug dealer who was an informant for the DEA and –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

What are the chances of finding one of those? [LAUGHTER]

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Yeah, yeah, it’s really pretty – it’s comic, we can laugh about it, but there could have been scores of people dead had they picked the right Mexican or picked somebody else to carry out that attack.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Including the Saudi ambassador to the United States among a lot of other Americans.

KEN TIMMERMAN:

Including the Saudi ambassador to the United States, right. So what we know is that the Iranians, when they want to, will carry out murderous attacks against us. They do not care about the proprieties, the niceties of diplomacy or the rest of it. They are not worried about US retaliation. They believe – and when you listen to the Iranian media as I do all the time, they believe as Khomeini said, the founder of the Islamic Republic in 1979, America can do nothing. And they are convinced that we can do nothing against them, we will do nothing to stop them, and that they are on the rise, and that they will soon dominate the Persian Gulf for starters, the rest of the Middle East soon after that, and once they get to that point, watch out.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

We have to leave it at that, I’m afraid. So much more to talk with you about, Ken, but thank you for giving us a chance to talk at such length and in such a comprehensive way about so many of the issues that we do need focused attention on. Keep it up, my friend. I hope you will come back to us again soon and we’ll talk with the rest of you again, I hope, tomorrow, same time, same station. Until then, this is Frank Gaffney. Thanks for listening.