Obama veteran who boasted about using ‘know nothing’ reporters to push Iran deal re-launches anti-Trump group
Fox News
A former Obama administration official who infamously used inexperienced reporters to manufacture support for the former president’s failed Iran nuclear deal is reviving an advocacy group with the sole purpose of keeping Donald Trump out of the White House.
Ben Rhodes, the former deputy national security advisor to the 44th president, alongside other Obama administration veterans, is set to re-launch National Security Action (NSA) in an effort to boost President Biden’s re-election bid by touting his foreign policy, a Tuesday report by Axios said.
According to the report, the group plans to unite Democrats divided over the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, and make the case that Biden is better than another four years of Trump.
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NSA was founded in 2018 to help Democrats in that year’s midterm elections and in 2020, by countering Republicans, including Trump, on national security-related issues. It was largely inactive during the 2022 midterm elections, but decided to jump back into the fray this year amid Trump’s surge toward becoming his party’s likely presidential nominee.
Although he’s been critical of Biden’s approach to Israel, Rhodes told Axios that this year the group would seek to “remind people that this is a choice that Trump represents a different approach to foreign policy that is very dangerous, and rather than making the crises in the world better, he is likely to make all of them worse.”
Rhodes became a nationally recognized name in 2016 after boasting in an interview with The New York Times Magazine that he and Obama’s foreign policy team built an “echo chamber” of experts to help sell the controversial Iran nuclear deal.
The article detailed how Rhodes’ “war room” worked to influence Capitol Hill lawmakers and reporters as the details of the Iranian nuclear deal were being hammered out in negotiations. According to Rhodes, the “echo chamber” was created by using arms-control experts that appeared at think tanks and were then used as sources for hundreds of reporters – whom the article described as “clueless.”
Of those experts, Rhodes said: “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
He then took a shot at the modern media landscape, lamenting the closure of many newspapers’ foreign bureaus and the level of experience of many political reporters.
“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,” he said.
Trump later pulled the U.S. out of the Iran deal in 2018, calling it “defective at its core.”
Fox News Digital reached out to National Security Action for comment.