Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) got himself into a bit of trouble responding to a social media post that claimed \u201c26 ships in Iran\u2019s shadow fleet have made it past the US blockade in the Gulf of Oman\u201d with a one-word response: \u201cawesome.\u201d<\/p>\n
The senator now contends<\/a> that his response was merely sarcasm and that \u201cTrump\u2019s bungled mismanagement of this war\u201d isn\u2019t \u201cawesome.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019m skeptical because I\u2019m aware of Murphy\u2019s history. Even if we accept the best framing of his reaction, the senator is shilling for the Iranian regime. The post in question relies on an unverified claim offered by Iranian propagandist Ali Vaez. Maybe 26 Iranian ghost ships have slipped by the U.S. blockade, or maybe not. We\u2019ll find out. But Murphy could not have known whether that was true when he spread the claim.\u00a0<\/p>\n And when I contend that Vaez is a regime-booster, I don\u2019t mean that he holds exotic views about terrorist regimes. I mean that Vaez is literally a conspirator<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAs an Iranian, based on my national and patriotic duty,\u201d Vaez wrote to the Islamic regime\u2019s foreign minister in 2014, \u201cI have not hesitated to help you in any way; from proposing to Your Excellency a public campaign against the notion of [nuclear] breakout, to assisting your team in preparing reports on practical needs of Iran.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The emails were uncovered<\/a> by Iran International in 2022. They included a cache of similar obsequious messages from other \u201cexperts\u201d within the orbit of Hamas fanboy Rob Malley<\/a> and Obama administration.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yet, Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, regularly reposts unverified claims from these people.<\/p>\n If Murphy is truly angered by \u201cTrump\u2019s bungled mismanagement of this war,\u201d does that mean he wants the administration to improve its blockade efforts? Of course not. Murphy believes the blockade is counterproductive. The reason he spreads Vaez\u2019s claims is to try to demoralize Americans.\u00a0<\/p>\n To be fair, the senator\u2019s obsession with defending the regime goes back to his earliest days in Washington. In 2017, during President Donald Trump\u2019s first term, Murphy secretly met Iranian Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in Munich to almost surely try to undermine the president\u2019s efforts to exert maximum pressure on the regime to abandon nuclear weapons. Murphy, who wanted to investigate Trump staffers<\/a> for merely speaking to the Russian ambassador and claimed<\/a> an open letter sent by Republican senators to the Iranian regime in 2015 \u201cundercut the credibility\u201d of the United States, had no problem hobnobbing off the record with a representative of a country that refers to the U.S. as the Great Satan.<\/p>\n By 2018, Murphy was on the Senate floor condemning<\/a> not the clerics but anti-regime Muslim-reformist groups such as American Islamic Forum for Democracy. Murphy has always had far harsher words for pro-Western Americans and our allies than for the mullahs and their proxies.<\/p>\n The senator was also agitated when Trump took out Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps terrorist leader Qassem Soleimani, responsible for the murder of over 600 dead and thousands of maimed servicemen, contending<\/a> that it was \u201cequivalent of the Iranians assassinating the U.S. secretary of defense.\u201d<\/p>\n