There was an interesting announcement on Wednesday for Ben Rhodes, formerly the Obama White House deputy national security adviser. Rhodes, you may recall, caught some flack at the end of Obama’s presidency for admitting to the New York Times that he was manipulating the media in his efforts to…
The new documentary The Final Year records the ups, the downs, the smiles, the frowns of President Obama’s foreign policy advisers during their last months in office. It was made for HBO but it won’t hit the small screen until later this year. For the moment it’s playing in a few theaters in Obama…
Top officials from the Obama administration are working to stymie congressional pressure on Iran, including through a quiet push in Congress by an organization that has been criticized for helping mislead the public about the Iran deal, according to correspondence obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
Please see the editor's note at the bottom of this piece.
In the latest issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, I have a piece on the problems of a media almost totally reliant on anonymous leaks to cover the Trump administration. This is obviously a huge part of the scandal surrounding Michael Flynn's resignation. As I note in the piece, "it's remarkable to…
When 14 members of the United Nations Security Council voted in 2011 for a resolution condemning the expansion of Israeli settlements as illegal, the Obama administration exercised the United States's veto power to block its passage. Opposition to settlements beyond Israel's borders established in…
Over the weekend the Washington Post published a review of Jay Solomon's book, The Iran Wars, written by New York Times reporter Elaine Sciolino. That one of America's top three remaining newspapers assigned a review of a book written by a reporter from another of the big three (Solomon is a…
A top aide to President Obama forgave Iran's deployment of an advanced missile defense system around one of its nuclear facilities on Monday.
Ambassador Wendy Sherman, lead negotiator for the Iran nuclear agreement, on Thursday defended the Iran deal narrative presented by senior Obama adviser Ben Rhodes in his controversial New York Times Magazine profile.
Guess who's not part of the White House's Iran deal "echo chamber"? Yep, Qassem Suleimani. The head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force thinks Iran and America aren't poised for realignment, but rather are at war. And Iran, he says, is thrashing the great Satan. "Iran relied on…
Sunday's New York Times Magazine story by David Samuels on President Obama's deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes has created quite a stir. It's not every day that a senior White House official brags about how the administration has successfully manipulated what he portrays as an ignorant…
Man, Ben Rhodes had an excellent weekend. The 38-year-old Mets' fan who serves as President Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser for strategic communications got to watch the press tear itself apart in rabid confusion, which proves one of his essential points—the U.S. media is a pile of…
When the secretary of state says, as John Kerry did last week in his Senate testimony, that the Obama White House is “guaranteeing” Iran won’t have the bomb, you can be sure that—well, you can be pretty confident that he doesn’t mean it. And that someday soon he’ll pretend he never said it.
President Obama's deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, has been using doublespeak to sell the nuclear deal to the American people. In April of this year, Rhodes claimed that the nuclear deal would include "anywhere, anytime" access to Iranian nuclear sites. Last night, the top Obama…
Josh Earnest appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe Friday in damage-control mode after President Obama's "we don't have a strategy yet" remark during his press conference on Thursday. Almost immediately after the president made the comment in response to a question by Chuck Todd, Earnest took…
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed last summer by Judicial Watch, the Obama administration last week released 41 documents related to the attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. An email from the deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, has…
Media reports suggest that President Obama is looking to declare victory and withdraw from Afghanistan, as he did from Iraq. The military commander in Afghanistan, General Joe Dunford, has said that he needs 10,000 US troops to accomplish the missions the president has said he wants to accomplish…
In a briefing with the press, deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes said that any military strike on Syria would be a response to chemical weapons--and would "not [intend] to resolve the underlying political crisis within Syria." Instead, "the underlying political crisis within Syria" would…
CNN’s Jake Tapper has obtained the verbatim text of an email from Ben Rhodes, a top Obama adviser on foreign policy and national security, which I referred to in two recent pieces on the Obama administration’s manipulation of the Benghazi talking points. It's a good scoop. Assuming the email is…
Last Wednesday, at 3:46 p.m., the White House Office of Public Engagement (WHOPE) sent an email message to 9/11 families to announce it was sponsoring a conference call the next day with victims' families in anticipation of the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks. The purpose of the…
Over at Foreign Policy, David J. Rothkopf is trying to understand the Obama adminstration's objectives in Libya. Specifically, he's trying to parse this statement from Ben Rhodes, the White House's foreign policy speechwriter: