Who would DO such a thing?

There is evidence that someone connected to the Trump White House hired Israeli spy firm Black Cube to find "dirt" on at least two former Obama officials connected to the Iran Nuclear Deal.

What is the point in that? Apparently to make it look like some low-level officials privately benefitted from the deal? To blackmail them or their wives? The whole thing is so weird but then again, Gorka.

It's Roger Stone, Gorka, Corey Lewandowski, Steve Bannon dirty tricks bullying straight out of the Nixon playbook.

So Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker finds that these two officials, were pretty low-level... and their wives were contacted via fake emails from fake people of fake companies:

The Observer reported that aides of President Trump had hired Black Cube to run the operation in order to undermine the Iran deal, allegations that Black Cube denies. “The idea was that people acting for Trump would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it,” a source told the Observer. One of the sources familiar with the effort told me that it was, in fact, part of Black Cube’s work for a private-sector client pursuing commercial interests related to sanctions on Iran....

Kahl, who worked as an adviser to Vice-President Joe Biden, said that he believed Trump associates may have been involved because of unsubstantiated reports in conservative media outlets accusing Rhodes and Kahl of damaging leaks about the Trump Administration. “Why Ben and I? Why conjoin Ben and me?” Kahl asked. “Of all the other senior people in the White House, I’m least senior.”

Of course. The reason someone close to Trump hired Black Cube to go after Rhodes and Kahl is because they're unknown enough that those two in particular could be the subject of smears at right wing blogs.

Today on Andrea Mitchell's show, national security expert Ned Price noted that this targeting has Seb Gorka's fingerprints all over it.

ANDREA MITCHELL: I want to ask you about another intelligence controversy, Black Cube. New revelations that, in fact, an Israeli covert firm was being used by some people connected to the Trump administration to go after former Obama people like Ben Rhodes, who were involved in the Iran negotiations, and try to discredit them.

NED PRICE: It's a very strange story and suggests that dirty tricks were not confined to the Nixon administration. What we found here, there is a circumstantial case to be made that a lot of this points back to former White House officials, people like Sebastian Gorka. It's very odd that Ben Rhodes and Colin Call were the alleged targets of this operation. They were not the architects of the Iran deal. Yes, they worked on it. But they were the focus of Sebastian Gorka. If you look at what he said during this time, he consistently harps on these two individuals and then just last night, we learned from a UK paper and from "The New Yorker," that this intelligence agency, this intelligence firm, was focusing on these very two individuals. You add those two things up, and his fingerprints appear to be all over this. There's a lot we don't know, but we need to find out more.

Here's video of what Price is talking about:

Colin Kahl and Ben Rhodes noticed their names being targeted at the same time:

and now, Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl are fighting back: