Leading U.S. officials are expressing concern about newly disclosed efforts by the Obama administration to play down the terrorism threat posed by Iran in an official report issued this year.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admitted in a recent letter to top senators that the administration wrongly excluded references to the global terrorism threat posed by Iran and its terror affiliate Hezbollah in the 2015 World Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community.
“A specific reference to the terrorist threat from Iran and Hizballah—which was not included in any of the drafts of the testimony [offered before lawmakers]—would have been appropriate for the 2015 Assessment, but the lack of its inclusion is in no way a change in the [intelligence community’s] assessment,” Clapper wrote in a June 3 letter to top senators.
Clapper’s letter came in response to an earlier letter from a delegation of senators who were seeking to discover why the Obama administration excluded references to Iran’s global terrorist operations.
“Despite ongoing nuclear negotiations and the administration’s evolving policy towards the Iranian regime, we are perplexed that your annual assessment contains no meaningful reference to the chaos that Iran manufactures through its support for terrorist groups and proxy organizations, which raises serious questions about the credibility of this annual exercise,” Sens. Dan Coats (Ind.), Tom Cotton (Ark.), Susan Collins (Maine), James Risch (Idaho), and James Lankford (Okla.) wrote in an April 28 letter to Clapper.
Some critics accuse the Obama administration of downplaying the terrorist threat posed by Iran and its proxies in order to appease the Islamic Republic and preserve the ongoing talks aimed at inking a wide-ranging nuclear deal.
Coats said that the Obama administration cannot overlook Iran’s longstanding financial support for terrorist groups across the region.
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