It should not surprise or shock anyone that President Barack Hussein Obama has been revealed to have derailed the investigation and prosecution of Iran’s terrorist sock puppet, Hezb’allah, and its drug-running operation in order to complete the fatally flawed Iran nuclear deal. Obama gave aid and comfort to terrorist groups and their state sponsors from the day he was sworn in, to the point of actual criminality.

Consider the case of Bowe Bergdahl, the deserter who left his post and his comrades in an Afghanistan combat zone to “find himself” and also to find the Taliban. Former U.N. ambassador and National Security Adviser Susan Rice, propagator of the Benghazi video lie, laughably said on the same talk show circuit that Bowe Bergdahl had “served with distinction.” This was the administration view of the man for whom Obama would trade key Taliban leaders in our custody.

President Obama welcomed and commiserated with Bowe Bergdahl’s parents in the Rose Garden on May 31, 2014. It would be stretching credulity to beyond the breaking point to believe President Obama did not know when it was announced we were trading five top Taliban commanders, soon to be free to return to the terrorist battlefield, for Bergdahl.

Even if Bergdahl was not a deserter, the trade would have been a bad deal. As Investor’s Business Daily noted in an editorial charging “Obama Gave Material Assistance To Our Taliban Enemy,” President Obama committed a federal crime by trading Taliban leaders for Bergdahl:

As former congressman and Afghanistan veteran Allen West points out, President Obama signed into law only months ago the National Defense Authorization Act, which makes it a crime to offer or provide any material support to terrorist groups. It makes no exception as to who and under which circumstances.

The Taliban is considered a non-state terrorist group to which Obama has returned five of the worst terrorists held at Guantanamo. They are not foot soldiers and this exchange was not at the end of a war, when prisoner swaps often happen. They are four-star general equivalents who will return to the battlefield to target and kill Americans again. If that's not material assistance, what is?...

"We have a federal statute which makes it a felony to provide material assistance to any terrorist organization," said Fox News judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano in support of West's opinion. "It could be money, maps, professional services, any asset whatsoever, include human assets."

hat Obama would endanger American security for a dubious photo-op and help empty a Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention facility he had pledged to close is beyond the pale. But then so is going to bed to rest up for a Las Vegas fundraiser the night four Americans were killed in Benghazi, including a U.S. ambassador, Christopher Stevens. Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Susan Rice couldn’t bring themselves to blame the terrorist groups that attacked in Benghazi, including Ansar al-Sharia, or even to utter the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism.” They preferred to spread the lie that a video was responsible, a lie they repeated on national TV, before the United Nations and to the parents of the Benghazi dead before their sons’ caskets:

Last Thursday, Judicial Watch issued a press release announcing that on Feb. 11 it had "uncovered documents from the U.S. Department of State revealing that top aides for then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, including her then-chief of staff Cheryl Mills, knew from the onset that the Benghazi mission compound was under attack by armed assailants tied to a terrorist group."

The documents, obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, make no mention of a reaction to an Internet video.

But they do contain references to an attack for which the al-Qaida-affiliated terrorist group Ansar al-Sharia had taken credit, information available to the State Department before it released the statement implicating a video.

President Obama and his administration precipitously withdrew from Iraq, snatching defeat from President Bush’s victory, and then ignored intelligence warnings on the rise of ISIS for a year: Obama once told CNN that the rise and expansion of the Islamic State was “not on my intelligence radar” As the Washington Examiner reported:

President Obama admitted to CNN's Fareed Zakaria, in a TV special "The Legacy of Barack Obama," that his administration underestimated the Islamic State terrorist group.

"The ability of ISIL to not just mass inside of Syria, but then to initiate major land offensives that took Mosul, for example, that was not on my intelligence radar screen," Obama said in a pre-taped interview that aired Wednesday evening.

Well, in order to see something on your radar, you actually have to look at it, and the fact is that President Obama from the start ignored his daily intelligence briefings, including the ones about ISIS that he ignored for a year. The fact is that President Obama, who famously dismissed ISIS as a “JV team,” ignored the intelligence reports of the rise of the Islamic State and the danger it posed. As Investor’s Business Daily editorialized, Obama’s later promise to “degrade and destroy” ISIS was an empty threat by a President who could have destroyed ISIS in the cradle but didn’t:

Degrade? Degrading has been the foreign policy of a president who recently said that he didn't have a strategy yet for dealing with the Islamic State's butchery after watching it train and prepare for a year in its Syrian base before its "sudden" expansion into Iraq.

A former Pentagon official told Fox News that Obama received specific intelligence in daily briefings about the Islamic State's rise. The information was said to be "granular" in detail, laying out IS' intentions and capabilities for at least a year before it seized big chunks of Iraqi territory and started beheading Americans.

Obama's indifference to the briefings was an issue during the 2012 campaign, when former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen observed that Obama personally attended only 44% of them. Obama's perceived lack of interest in a terror war, which he claimed was won prior to the Benghazi attack, mirrors his reported lack of interest in the rise of the Islamic State.

So with Obama’s turning a blind eye to the terrorist threats posed by the Taliban, Ansar Al-Sharia, and ISIS, even offering material aid and comfort to the Taliban, should we be surprised that he flew pallets containing $1.7 billion in cash to Iran, cash used to fund terrorist groups like Hizb’allah whose drug-running he excused and ignored?

Just as he was an accomplice to gunrunning in Operation Fast and Furious, which got Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and many others killed, now we know Pressident Obama was so intent on getting any kind of nuclear deal with the state sponsor of terror known as Iran that he was willing to derail efforts that were about to shut down Hizb’allah’s drug running activities inside the United States:

In order to keep the Iran nuclear deal on track, Obama gave a free pass to Hezbollah’s drug-trafficking and money-laundering operations, including crimes unfolding inside the United States, Politico reported.

A Drug Enforcement Administration campaign, “Project Cassandra,” was launched to target the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah’s illicit networks, tracing the actions “to the innermost circle of Hizb’allah and its state sponsors in Iran,” according to the online political news outlet…

David Asher, a Defense Department illicit finance analyst who helped establish and oversee Project Cassandra, said the Obama White House “ripped apart” their efforts.

“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” Asher said. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”

The closer Obama got to cementing the Iran nuclear deal, Asher said, the more difficult it was to conduct their investigation into Hezbollah activities.

Obama shut down the opportunity to end Hizb’allah’s drug trafficking operation, putting the lives of American youth at risk, in order to cement his legacy in the fatally flawed Iran nuclear deal. As Josh Meyer detailed in Politico:

But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests.

The Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as Hizbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force. And the State Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries where they could be arrested.

Coupled with his material aid and comfort to the Taliban, Obama’s obstruction of justice in shutting down Hizb’allah’s drug-running operation and failing to prosecute those running it constitutes crimes against the United States worthy of investigation, prosecution, and, yes, incarceration.

Daniel John Sobieski is a free lance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.